Philosophy Request Line: Why, "Plato was a jerk"

[blindpig]

(Photo: Saul B. Foster)

Matter in motion: Dialectical philosophy’s role in science
Originally published: Advanced Science News on March 15, 2024 by Kieran Schlegel-O'Brien (more by Advanced Science News) | (Posted Apr 17, 2024)

In this second article in a series on philosophy and science, we take a look at dialectics and its relevance to understanding change in the natural world.

Part 1 https://mronline.org/2024/04/16/materialism-matters/

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” So said Heraclitus over two-and-a-half thousand years ago. An ancient Ionian philosopher, Heraclitus is most well-known for his philosophy of flux, or change, a philosophy that has found various expressions throughout world history, and in modern times has come to be called dialectics.

What Heraclitus meant by this was that flux and motion are fundamental aspects of matter, and more importantly that contradictions abound within nature. Everything both is and is not. You cannot step into the “same” river twice because the water has moved and isn’t the same water you stepped into previously.

The same is true for the person in Heraclitus’ quote. The human body, like all organisms, is in a state of constant change–cells die and new cells are reproduced all the time. What we eat gets metabolized and the chemicals and minerals in our food replaces those already making up our cells.

You do not notice these changes on a day-to-day level, but on a long-enough time scale, it could be that most, if not all, of the atoms that made up you a couple of decades ago have all been replaced. In a chemical sense, you are physically a completely different person to who you were then, yet at the same time, you are obviously the same person.

This is the essence of the philosophy of dialectics, and arising from this state of flux come certain contradictions, which together give rise to new qualities.

Dialectics and materialism
As mentioned in the previous article, the German philosopher Hegel, influenced by Heraclitus, brought dialectics back into Western philosophy in the 19th century, which became highly influential and found new meaning when later coupled with materialist philosophy–known as dialectical materialism.

Dialectical materialism is often met with skepticism and hostility due to its association with the later German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who were directly influenced by Hegel and considered themselves dialectical materialists. But I think this skepticism is premature.

In my view, detractors of dialectical materialism often object to Marx and Engels’ application of this philosophical method to the study of human society and human history, things which the detractors believe cannot be understood in a scientific way, and therefore discredit dialectical materialism in general. However, whatever your views on this point—and the question of whether we can actually scientifically study and understand society and history is not the subject of this article–this criticism overlooks the applicability of dialectical materialism to the natural sciences.

Where mechanical materialism–the deterministic and clock-work view of the Universe during the Enlightenment–hit a dead-end, dialectical materialism carried materialism forward and enriched materialist philosophy with a more advanced, holistic view of the world, taking into account and embracing contradictions in nature rather than ignoring or seeing them as a problem.

Contradiction and conflict
The first law of dialectics, worked out by Hegel, explores the concept of “the unity and conflict of opposites”. We have already touched upon this first law with the example given by Heraclitus. Other examples of contradictions and opposites in nature include hot and cold, positive and negative, the two magnetic poles of north and south, cause and effect, part and whole, and life and death.

None of these things can be described or understood, or in some cases even exist, without the existence or acknowledgement of their opposites. The contradiction and conflict of the part and whole is also of particular importance to the natural sciences.

For example, let’s look at water. Water is made up of H2 O molecules. These molecular “parts” make up the “whole”, which we call water. However, looking at each individual part in isolation, they are in many ways completely different to water. Water is wet, but a single H2 O molecule is not. The property, or quality, of “wetness” only exists when H2 O molecules come together and organize themselves. In other words the property of wetness is a result of the relationship of individual water molecules interacting with each other and organizing themselves in a particular way.

This holistic and dialectal approach to understanding the world stands in contradiction to another aspect of science, which would eventually prove to have its limits: reductionism. That is, in studying the natural world through observation and experiment, it was tempting to see things in isolation and in their component parts, rather than as part of the context of their environment and development–things were understood to be nothing more than the sum of their parts.

This was particularly true in biology and anatomy. Whilst the reductionist method helped shine light on our understanding of how the body works, it nevertheless on its own leads us into an incomplete understanding of biology.

At the turn of this century, there was a wave of reductionist thinking and hopes surrounding the Human Genome Project, with scientists and the media talking about us being able to discover the gene for pretty much everything. There were races to find the gene for criminal behavior, the gene for creative talent, or the gene for high intelligence. Perhaps unsurprisingly, such pursuits came up short.

With apologies to the proponents of “the selfish gene”, a living organism is more than just what’s encoded in its DNA. It is also more than just the tissues and organs for which these genes code and which make it up. A living organism is a thing in and of its self. It is the cumulative product of all these individual parts–the genes, the organs, the tissues–developing and interacting together to produce an organism with properties and qualities, which its individual parts do not possess on their own.

Modern geneticists and biologists are moving away from the over-simplified, reductionist view of life, and recognize that genes and the organism to which they belong have a complicated interplay that cannot be described by genes alone as described above.

Epigenetics and the recognition of external factors also affecting a living organism’s development are a welcome recognition of reductionism’s limits, and I would say also show a move (perhaps unconsciously) to a dialectic way of thinking and understanding within the biological sciences.

I mentioned that dialectics is the philosophy of change within matter, but it would be incorrect to take a completely one-sided view and claim that matter is constantly in a state of change. There exist of course periods of stasis and equilibrium. This seems to contradict the whole notion of dialectics, but the second law of dialectics—the passage of quantitative changes into qualitative changes–helps to overcome this contradiction.

Quantity into quality
The fields of chaos theory, emergence, and complexity are perhaps the most powerful discoveries which vindicate this next fundamental law of dialectics.

The relatively new science of “emergence”–the idea that some properties emerge from within the inner workings of a particular system whose constituent parts do not possess such properties–is essentially the laws of dialectics written in the language of mathematics and physics.

From avalanches to earthquakes, phase transitions to the death of stars, nature is abound with examples of this process of change. That is, small, sometimes imperceptible changes to a system take place over a period of time without much noticeable happening until a critical point is reached when the system undergoes a qualitative change.

Let’s look again at water. As is well known, from between 0 and 100 °C, water is qualitatively the same. It may feel hotter or colder depending on its temperature, but it remains a liquid and behaves generally in the same way whether it is at 1 °C or 99 °C. The quantitative change in this example is adding heat to the water to increase its temperature, which suddenly, at 100 °C, causes a qualitative change to the water in the form of it boiling and turning into steam. This is known as a phase transition and of course applies not just to water. What is perhaps not so well known is that such a process of change is a perfect example of dialectics in action.

Change therefore does not always take place gradually and evenly, but rather often in leaps and bounds, and in a lot of cases, is a product of dialectics’ first law of contradiction and conflict within a system.

The theory of evolution has been greatly enriched by appreciating these laws of dialectics. In the decades since the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, evolution was thought to be a slow and gradual process whereby species, via natural selection, undergo small changes from one generation to the next until eventually, so much change has occurred that a new species has evolved.

The problem with this view of evolution was the fossil record, which showed a worrying lack of “intermediates” between species. It appeared that the transition from one species to another was a fast and sudden process.

In the 1970s, evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge came up with the theory of punctuated equilibrium. This theory states that species can be stable for long periods of time and find an equilibrium in their environment and ecology, and these periods of equilibrium are “punctuated” by sudden changes leading to the rise of new species. These changes could be due to external, environmental factors or a mutation in their genes which gives rise to such an advantageous trait that that gene propagates through the population in a relatively short space of time.

One of the most famous examples of this process is the Cambrian explosion, when just over half a billion years ago, life took a sudden leap with an “explosion” in diversity and evolution of new species and phyla and complex organisms, breaking out of the hundreds of millions of years prior when all life on Earth was simple and mostly unicellular.

Punctuated equilibrium remains controversial in some circles and there is by no means a consensus on what the correct model of evolution is, but in my view, the theory of Gould and Eldredge is the best yet in explaining why the fossil record looks like the way it is: evolution is a dialectical process, not a gradualist one.

It is also worth noting that Gould was a conscious dialectical materialist and used dialectical materialism as a heuristic approach to his science. Perhaps without his dialectical thinking and worldview, he may not have come to this theory of evolution based on the evidence at hand.

The negation of the negation
Evolution by natural selection shows us dialectics at play. The third law of dialectics, the negation of the negation, also finds expression in biological and evolutionary change quite nicely.

This term sounds quite strange and abstract, and is best illustrated with an example–and biology provides us with plenty.

Consider an acorn and an oak tree. From a dialectical perspective, they are both the same and different things. The same, since an oak tree grows from an acorn and an oak tree produces more acorns, and different since an acorn and an oak tree are clearly two distinct things. From a scientific perspective, this can be explained, of course, by the fact an acorn and an oak tree share the same DNA; they are the same organism at different stages in its development and lifecycle.

The negation of the negation alludes to the fact that in this example, the destruction or negation of one thing gives rise to something new, which itself also develops and changes, until that is negated in place of something new but on a higher level.

Under the right physical and environmental conditions, an acorn will germinate and grow into an oak sapling. The acorn no longer exists, it has been “negated”, and in its place has grown a tree. At a certain point, that tree will bear fruit and produce not one acorn, but many more acorns over its lifetime.

When the tree finally dies–when it is also negated–the multitude of acorns it produced will have produced many more oak trees. When we add evolution to this analogy, this multitude of new acorns and trees are the “higher level” referred to in the previous paragraph: the negation of the negation has come full circle, but the new acorns are not identical to the original, but have new mutations, new features, and in the long run, may even give rise to a new species of oak tree better adapted to its environment.

The negation of the negation also highlights one further aspect of dialectical processes, which is that some things have a tendency to turn into their opposites. This applies in some ways to all three laws of dialectics.

We see such phenomena in wider systems with many interconnecting and inter-relating parts. In the history of life on Earth, photosynthetic organisms evolved first, and their byproduct—molecular oxygen—was toxic to life. But when life evolved bacteria that utilized oxygen for its own metabolism, oxygen stopped being a toxin for a whole branch of organisms, and now we cannot imagine life on Earth without it.

Where the previous article in this series showed how materialism, as opposed to idealism, is the correct starting point for science and the understanding of nature, I have tried in this article to show how dialectics —in conjunction with materialism–is an appropriate philosophy and worldview to have when dealing with the science of change within nature.

But I think Stephen Jay Gould put it best in his essay “Nurturing Nature”, published in his book An Urchin in the Storm: Essays about Books and Ideas, when he wrote:

[…] dialectical thinking should be taken more seriously by Western scholars […] When presented as guidelines for a philosophy of change, not as dogmatic precepts true by fiat, the three classical laws of dialectics embody a holistic vision that views change as interaction among components of complete systems and sees the components themselves not as a priori entities, but as both products and inputs to the system.

Thus, the law of ‘interpenetrating opposites’ records the inextricable interdependence of components; the ‘transformation of quantity to quality’ defends a systems-based view of change that translates incremental inputs into alterations of state; and the ‘negation of negation’ describes the direction given to history because complex systems cannot revert exactly to previous states.

In the next and final article, we’ll look at some of the most recent ideas in science and show how they too shed light on the dialectical nature of the Universe. We’ll see how dialectical thinking could point towards the answers to the big questions in modern science.

https://mronline.org/2024/04/17/matter-in-motion/

[blindpig]

On the Marxist critique of Heidegger
Originally published: Philosophy in Crisis on April 21, 2024 by Carlos L. Garrido (more by Philosophy in Crisis) (Posted Apr 23, 2024)

Martin Heidegger is undoubtedly one of the most creative and influential philosophers of the 20th century. Virtually all areas of philosophy, along with many other disciplines as well, have had to tackle in one form or another the questions he poses, and the insights he provides. His work grasped the zeitgeist of the 1930s and 40s for most of continental philosophy. It is a tour de force Marxist philosophers must face head on. Simply calling it ‘bourgeois,’ ‘Nazi’, or the expression of the middle-class state of being in post WW1 Germany is not enough. While it is important to situate Heidegger in his proper historical and class context, and while it is essential to show the Nazism and antisemitism he was undoubtedly committed to for a significant period of his life, this is insufficient to defeat the thought of this giant.

Other leftist scholars have already made tremendous inroads in this area. Since at least the publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, but especially now with the publication of Richard Wolin’s recent text, Heidegger in Ruins, the intimate connection between Heidegger and Nazism is indisputable—even though many, including those working within his Gesamtausgabe (collected works), have tried to paper over it. Certainly, to borrow an expression Domenico Losurdo uses to describe Nietzsche scholarship, there has pervaded a “hermeneutic of innocence” in Heideggerian scholarship which tries to divorce his work from the essentially political context that embeds it. Its political horizon, its class basis, its connection with Nazism, these are all things any Marxist discussion on Heidegger should include. But we must ask, is this enough to ‘defeat’ Heidegger? If he was simply a ‘Nazi,’ why hasn’t he, like Emmanual Faye suggests, been taken off philosophy shelves and put next to Goebbels?1

Why have so many leftist scholars in the Global South and East, thinkers aware of Heidegger’s Nazism, turned in various parts of their work to Heidegger for insights? Unlike the tradition of Western Marxism, where the eclecticism is intimately connected to a politics that throws on the support of imperialism a radical veneer, a lot of these scholars are fervent critics of U.S. imperialism and have stood for decades on the side of socialist construction. Why does, for instance, the late Bolivian Marxist, Juan Jose Bautista Segales, find that he can incorporate insights from Heidegger’s critique of modernity into the process of understanding the dimensions of the indigenous struggle for socialism, a struggle that must, necessarily, tarry with the question of capitalist modernity? Why does the Brazilian theologian, Leonardo Boff, one of the founders of the radical, Christian Socialist liberation theology tendency, central to so many socialist and anti-imperialist struggles in Latin American, turn to Heidegger to discuss the question of care in ethics?

In his Prison Notebooks Antonio Gramsci reminds us that:

A new science proves its efficacy and vitality when it demonstrates that it is capable of confronting the great champions of the tendencies opposed to it and when it either resolves by its own means the vital questions which they have posed or demonstrates, in peremptory fashion, that these questions are false problems.2

Gramsci would go on to lambast Nikolai Bukharin, in part, for failing to address in his ‘Manual’ the critics of Marxism in their utmost coherence, i.e., for failing to deal with the best bourgeois philosophy and science had to offer, opting instead to obtaining the quick victories one gets when they challenge an opponent of a lower caliber. Gramsci says that while reading Bukharin’s text, “one has the impression of someone who cannot sleep for the moonlight and who struggles to massacre the fireflies in the belief that by so doing he will make the brightness lessen or disappear.”3

Unfortunately, a similar fatal flaw can be observed in the traditional Marxist-Leninist critiques of Heidegger. Far from engaging with him honestly and comprehensively, we have opted for quick victories based on dismissals of his thought as petty-bourgeois, subjectivist, Nazi, etc. While components of this critique are certainly true, they are not enough—i.e., they are not worthy of proper Marxist-Leninist critique. Yes, Marx, Engels, and Lenin name-called their opponents and spoke of the class positions and subsequent political interests they often spoke from—but in conjunction with this was always a thorough demolishing of their arguments along the kind described by Gramsci previously. Additionally, how these thinkers expressed in their work and concerns a class position was something that was proved, i.e., there was a concrete study of the relationship between the base and superstructure, between the class the thinker represents and the ideas they enunciate. This refined analysis has often been missing in our tradition’s treatment of Heidegger. Far too often conclusions that have to be proven are accepted simply at face value. As R. T. De George, who did an umbrella study of Marxist-Leninist writing on Heidegger up until the mid-1960s, argued,

The failure of Marxist criticism of Heidegger, as well as of other Western philosophers, is not necessarily that it has been wrong; but rather that most of it has been shallow, polemical, beside the point, and poor Marxism. Marxist criticism is difficult. Marxist-Leninist criticism has become too easy. It would perhaps be too much to ask that Marxists follow Lenin’s advice and criticize not in the manner of Feuerbach but in the manner of Hegel, i.e. not by merely rejecting views but by correcting them “deepening, generalizing, and extending them, showing the connection and transitions of each and every concept”. But this presumably is what Marxist and Marxist Leninist philosophy should do.4

De George is, of course, not a Marxist. But he is right to call us out on this shortcoming. In doing so he is being a good ideological enemy, an enemy that, to use an obscene American expression, wants us to get our shit together.

In the 20th century, the best inroads into the Marxist-Leninist critique of Heidegger would be made by Georg Lukács, who situates him within the irrationalism of the imperialist period in his seminal Destruction of Reason. Here Lukács is correct about what it takes to carry forth this critique in a proper Marxist manner. He writes:

To reveal [a thinker’s] social genesis and function is of the greatest importance, but in itself by no means sufficient. Granted, the objectivity of progress will suffice correctly to condemn as reactionary an individual phenomenon or orientation. But a really Marxist-Leninist critique of reactionary philosophy cannot permit itself to stop at this. Rather it must show in real terms, in the philosophical material itself, the philosophical falsity and the distortion of basic philosophical questions, the negation of philosophy’s achievements and so on… To this extent, an immanent critique is a justified and indeed indispensable element in the portrayal and exposure of reactionary tendencies in philosophy. The classic Marxist authors have constantly used it. Engels, for example, in his Anti-Duhring and Lenin in his Empirio-Criticism. To reject immanent criticism as one element in an overall survey also embracing social genesis and function, class characteristics, exploration of the true nature of society and so on is bound to lead to a philosophical sectarianism, to the attitude that everything which is axiomatic to a conscious Marxist-Leninist is also immediately obvious to his readers…[Therefore, while] the antithesis between the various bourgeois ideologies and the achievements of dialectical and historical materialism is the self-evident foundation of our treatment and critique of the subject-matter, [we must still] prove in factual, philosophical terms the inner incoherence, contradictoriness, etc., of the separate philosophies [as] also unavoidable if one wants to illustrate their reactionary character in a truly concrete way.5

This is precisely the task that Lukács sets for himself in this monumental text. However, as he tells us, it is a task that cannot possibly be completed in one book, even an 800 page one. The Heidegger section, for instance, is a mere 25 pages. Even shorter is his treatment of Heidegger in Existentialism or Marxism, published a few years after. Nonetheless, it is on the basis of this limited work that a proper Marxist-Leninist critique of Heidegger can be developed.



Lukács tells us that with Heidegger phenomenology “turned into the ideology of the agony of individualism in the imperialist period.”6 He performed a “terminological camouflaging of subjective idealism,” a “transference of purely subjective-idealist positions into objective (i.e., pseudo-objective) ones.”7 His “ontological materiality” and claims to concreteness “remained purely declarative,” dominated through and through by irrationalistic arbitrariness and an “epistemological hocus pocus.”8 Even in the aspects of his thought that are ‘historical’, what is operative, Lukács argues, is the “transformation of real history into a mythified pseudo-history.”9 In Heidegger the “Husserlian tendency towards a strictly scientific approach,” intuitivist and irrationalist though it might have been in its own right, had now “faded completely.”10 Philosophy’s task was “to keep investigation open by means of questions.”11 The discipline is turned into a big question rigamarole centered on a question of Being that had already been answered by the discipline more than a century prior in Hegel’ Science of Logic, where it was shown, in its indeterminacy, to be indistinguishable from nothing, impelling us to move beyond pure being into being as coming to be and seizing to be, being as becoming, determinate being, and all the subsequent categories unfolded out of these in the Logic.

The context which situates the rise of Heidegger, Lukács writes, is akin to the post-1848 context which saw the rise of Soren Kierkegaard’s romantic individualist agony: “Kierkegaard’s philosophy was aimed against the bourgeois idea of progress, against Hegel’s idealist dialectics, whereas the renovators of existential philosophy [i.e., Heidegger and et. al.] were already principally at odds with Marxism, although this seldom found overt and direct expression in their writings.”12 This mood of despair, for Lukács, produced like it had decades prior, an “ideology of the saddest philistinism, of fear and trembling, of anxiety” which “was precisely the socio-psychological reason for the influence of Heidegger and Jaspers” on the eve of Hitler’s seizure of power.13 It was a “yearning to rescue naked existence from universal collapse.”14 Philosophically it was marked by an attempt at ‘third ways’ beyond idealism and materialism and rationalism and irrationalism, but in each instance, idealism and irrationalism ultimately showed their dominance.

While his phenomenology and ontology were, in Lukács’s words, little more than “abstractly mythicizing” a “vitalistic anthropology with an objectivistic mask,”15 it nonetheless provided, he admits, an “often grippingly interesting description of intellectual philistinism during the crisis of the imperialist period.”16 In his phenomenological description of the inauthenticity of everyday existence, pervaded by Verfallensein, a state of falling prey, we come under the “anonymous dominance of das Man” (the one or they).17 Lukács argues that Heidegger’s detailed description of this fallen state “constitute the strongest and most suggestive part of Being and Time, and in all likelihood they formed the basis of the book’s broad and profound effect… [It is] here, with the tools of phenomenology, [that] Heidegger [gives] a series of interesting images taken from the inner life, from the worldview of the dissolute bourgeois mind of the post-war years.”18 While he was fundamentally unable to understand the socio-historical causes that grounded such experience, Lukács holds that the value of his account is seen in the fact that it “provides—on the descriptive level—a genuine and true-to-life picture of those conscious reflexes which the reality of the post-war imperialist capitalism triggered off in those unable or unwilling to surpass what they experienced in their individual existence and to go further towards objectivity, i.e., towards exploring the socio-historical causes of their experiences.”19

Here Heidegger follows to the T the tradition of irrationalism which preceded him and of which he becomes a central figure of in the 20th century. As Lukács writes in Existentialism or Marxism:

In times of the crisis of imperialism, when everything is unstable, everything is in disarray, when the bourgeois intelligentsia is forced to observe, as the next day refutes what seemed indestructible today, it is faced with a choice. It must admit either its own defeat or the defeat of reason. The first path means recognizing your inability to comprehend reality in thought. Here it would be the turn of reason, but it is from this rationality that bourgeois thinking must withdraw. It is impossible to recognize this defeat from a bourgeois standpoint, for that would mean a transition to the camp of socialism. Therefore, at the crossroads, the bourgeois intelligentsia must choose a different path; it must proclaim the collapse of reason.20

While the scope of the work leads Lukács to sometimes move too quick in his critique of Heidegger, his situating of him in the tradition of irrationalism and its rejection of the enlightenment is a thread that must be picked up and developed by Marxist scholarship on Heidegger. The best place I have seen this done is in Domenico Losurdo’s Heidegger and the Ideology of War, published first in Italian in 1991, and in English a decade after. Here it is lucidly shown how Heidegger and the Nazis inherit the Kreigsideology (War ideology) of the post-WW1 period, rooted in a mythical Gemeinschaft (community) inhibited by an equally dubious notion of fate (Schicksal) and a fetish of death and its proximity as central to authentic life. Reason, which is tied to civilization and society (Gesellschaft), is lambasted for tearing communal bonds and breaking from the community’s destiny.21 The enlightenment, the French Revolution, and Marxism, which takes the rational kernel of the former to their historical and logical conclusion, are necessarily condemned.22

The rejection of modernity and the Enlightenment has been a fad in Western academia for decades. Heidegger alone is not to blame. But he is, as a fellow traveler of the tradition of irrationalism, a key voice in the anti-modernity and anti-Enlightenment discourse. The Enlightenment, although imperfect and filled with contradictions, brought with it the notion of a universal humanity that we all share in as rational creatures, that provides for us the ability to see and fight for progress in history. It represented the thought of the bourgeoisie in its most progressive moment, before it undeniably turns into a force of reaction after the 1848 revolutions. The universalist ideals of the enlightenment have been given concrete content through the various progressive struggles of the last three centuries—from the American revolution to the French to the Haitian and to the socialist and anti-colonial revolutions of the 20th century. Those who have stood against it have been the forces of reaction—those who deny our common humanity in favor of tribalism (usually of a hierarchical and supremacist kind). It has been the reactionary and conservative forces who have historically rejected the use of reason and the notion of progress, since both of these can provide challenges to the ruling order… an order which can become the object of critique through reason, and which can be shown, through an appeal to the progressive dialectical unfolding of history (or, in Martin Luther King Jr.’s words, through the arch of the moral universe that bends towards justice) to be just a moment in humanity’s development towards greater freedom.



Central to any Marxist critique of Heidegger, then, is also considering how this foundational rejection of the enlightenment—necessary for bourgeois philosophical irrationalism and its turn towards indirect apologetics of the system—takes alternative forms after Heidegger. John Bellamy Foster has done important work in this area, showing how currents dominating contemporary social sciences in Academia like postmodernism, post-Marxism, post-colonialism, post-humanism, etc. all share a foundation in philosophical irrationalism and its indirect apologetics of the dominant order.23 Although with certain downfalls, the work of Susan Neiman in Left is Not Woke also does a swell job in showing how the tribalism central to contemporary wokeism is fundamentally rooted in the reactionary, anti-modernist and anti-enlightenment tradition which Heidegger is a central figure of. For all the claims to being ‘woke’, this dominant ideology in the liberal wing of capital is deeply ignorant of the reactionary philosophical foundations underlaying their worldview—a worldview that serves to reinforce the dominant order under the delusion that it is waging an emancipatory attack on it.

A Marxist critique of Heidegger, therefore, must also contain an awareness of how the tradition he works through has seeped into the Academic and activist left, often giving its deeply reactionary philosophical foundation a seemingly progressive gloss. For this we must also study the work of our colleague Gabriel Rockhill, who outlines the political economy of knowledge that has facilitated and promoted this eclecticism to counter the genuine communist left.

In sum, while necessary, exposing Heidegger’s Nazism and his thought’s class basis is insufficient to defeating him. As Gramsci and Lukács have argued, we must also beat these monumental figures of contemporary bourgeois thought in the realm of ideas as well—showing how the problems they pose are baseless, or how the response they provide to real problems are insufficient. These are things that must be shown, not just taken axiomatically for granted simply because we understand the Marxist worldview to be the most advanced humanity has given rise to. If in questions of ethics or meta-historical narratives comrades of the left (like the two I previously mentioned) turn to Heidegger, it is not sufficient to just lambast them for taking partial insights from a problematic thinker. We must also inquire into what deficiency is there in our answering—or even asking—of the problem that led them to turn to Heidegger. How can the Marxist worldview extend itself to commenting concretely on every possible topic of intellectual inquiry such that the need to turn to Heidegger, or any other bourgeois thinker, is superfluous for those within our tradition.

This requires an explicit turn away from the Western Marxism accepted in the Academy. This so called ‘Marxism’, imbued with postmodernist sensibilities, cringes at the description of Marxism as an all-encompassing worldview. They wish to limit Marxism to the sphere of history and social analysis, rejecting the dialectics of nature and the fruitful insights the dialectical materialist worldview can provide in any sphere of investigation. In China, where Marxism-Leninism has been able to develop relatively peacefully since at least 1949, the tendency is towards the contrary. The more fields the Marxist worldview can be present in the merrier. I would like to conclude with a quote from Cheng Enfu’s China’s Economic Dialectic,

Marxism is a telescope through which we can clearly see the trends according to which reality develops, and a microscope through which we can see its crucial details. It is a set of night-vision goggles through which we can see light and hope in the darkness, a set of diving goggles through which we can see things at a deeper level, a fluoroscope through which we can see into the nature of the matter beyond the level of appearance, and a megaloscope through which we can make sense of blurred images. Marxism is a reflector through which we can see the truth behind things, a polygonal mirror that enables us to see the diversity and unity of opposites, an asymptotic mirror that allows us to see things near and far with multiple focal points and a monster-revealing mirror in which, if we have sharp eyes, we can see mistakes clearly.24

This should help to get us to see Marxism as an all-encompassing worldview. A worldview which, as Lenin told the Young Communists in 1921, absorbs and develops upon the “knowledge of all the treasures created by mankind.”25 When we are successful in this task, the need for anyone in the camp of the genuine progressive forces to turn to Heidegger or any other bourgeois thinker would be superfluous, since they would find a much more concretely explicated account for their inquiry within the tradition itself… or, at the very least, the tools to do so themselves ready-to-hand (pun intended).

Notes:
1.↩ Gregory Fried, “A Letter to Emmanuel Faye,” in Confronting Heidegger: A Critical Dialogue on Politics and Philosophy (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), 5
2.↩ Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 2014), 433.
3.↩ Ibid.
4.↩ R. T. De George, “Heidegger and the Marxists,” Studies in Soviet Thought, 5(4) (1965), 294.
5.↩ Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason (New York: Verso, 2021), 5-6.
6.↩ Ibid.,489.
7.↩ Ibid., 496, 494.
8.↩ Ibid., 495-6, 493.
9.↩ Georg Lukács, “Heidegger Redivivus,” in Existentialismus oder Marxismus. Retrieved through Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive//lukac ... degger.htm
10.↩ Lukács, Destruction of Reason, 497.
11.↩ Ibid. 498.
12.↩ Ibid. 491.
13.↩ Ibid.
14.↩ Ibid., 493.
15.↩ Ibid., 498, 497.
16.↩ Ibid., 498.
17.↩ Ibid., 498-9.
18.↩ Ibid., 500.
19.↩ Ibid.
20.↩ Georg Lukács, “The Crisis of Bourgeois Philosophy,” in Existentialismus oder Marxismus. Retrieved through Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs ... osophy.htm
21.↩ Domenico Losurdo, Heidegger and The Ideology of War: Community, Death, and the West (New York: Humanity Books, 2001), 15-40.
22.↩ I am happy to see my friend, Colin Bodayle, recently take this task up. I have known no other Marxist who has studied Heidegger’s work as closely as he has (and in the original German). For more, see the series titled “Why the Left Should Reject Heidegger’s Thought,” published through the Midwestern Marx Institute for Marxist Theory and Political Analysis. Part one is here: https://www.midwesternmarx.com/articles ... in-bodayle
23.↩ John Bellamy Foster, “The New Irrationalism,” Monthly Review 74(9) (February 2023): https://monthlyreview.org/2023/02/01/th ... tionalism/
24.↩ Cheng Enfu, China’s Economic Dialectic: The Original Aspiration of Reform (New York: International Publishers, 2019), 20.
25.4↩ V. I. Lenin, “The Task of the Youth Leagues,” in Collected Works Vol. 31 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), 287.

https://mronline.org/2024/04/23/on-the- ... heidegger/

[blindpig]

Alfredo Maneiro: Political Power with a Revolutionary Quality
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JUNE 11, 2024
Reinaldo Iturriza López

Do “the ends justify the means” in politics?


Alfredo Maneiro, Reader of Machiavelli

When Alfredo Maneiro immerses himself in studying the historical significance of Niccolo Machiavelli’s work1, he proceeds to an “elucidation of the current exercise of philosophy”. In his opinion, “the most important problem of philosophy and, at the same time, the most common problem among philosophers, is its application”. The philosophy of his time, and this is particularly true of “academic Marxism”, is an “embarrassed philosophy that pretends to hide its banality by calling itself scientific and that sings its own requiem not because it is realized, but because it is inconsequential.”

In contrast to this philosophy that is “too exegetical, dogmatic and not very dedicated to trying to be… a wise night owl,” Maneiro offers a plea for the philosophy of praxis or, to put it more directly, the kind of philosophy that distinguishes Machiavelli.

“Machiavelli is, par excellence, the philosopher of the Renaissance and the renaissance of philosophy,” he states. He then proceeds to explain the historical context that stands out for its conciseness: Machiavelli’s Florence will turn out to be “a sort of kingdom of the constructive speculation of political philosophy.” It is a place where “political activity, conscious of itself, sought in its reflection, and as part of it, a link with practical reality. The philosophy of praxis seemed to proclaim: ‘Starting from me, it only remains to find the executioner’.” He adds: “Never as in Florence, in the Renaissance, had the community been presented to political philosophy as such a malleable matter. Political speculation did not feel… seduced by the need for permanence.” On the contrary, “sudden changes appeared not only possible but natural.”

It is in such a context that Machiavelli unfolds his genius. Maneiro reminds us that, before being a philosopher of praxis, Machiavelli was “a politician, Council secretary and ambassador, maker and undoer of misfortunes.” It is by leaving “the main stage” that he enters the field of theory, and in this “passage from practical Machiavelli to political theorist” it is possible to “discover, illustrate and… exemplify the content, significance and current meaning of the philosophy of praxis.”

Maneiro points out that “it is necessary to try to understand the philosophy of praxis, not from the object, but on the contrary, from the intention, purpose or program.” In this sense, “there is no reason for the usual reproach that ‘philosophy has no application’ to be assumed by the philosophy of praxis”, especially if “programmatically, as it is in the majority and the most serious cases, it simplifies its ‘technological’ mediation: politics.” Or, in other words, if it is assumed that the “general program” of the philosophy of praxis is “to become more and more of a ‘direct productive force.’”

In Machiavelli’s specific case, the programmatic aspect is directly associated with what Maneiro defines as “a firm modern national passion”, which he considers “his most important and remarkable biographical trait” and which “functions not only as a guiding thread through the multiple vicissitudes of his life, but is also the key that gives meaning to the work.” Maneiro continues: “From that passion and directed by it, as well as from his class training and his talent, Machiavelli witnessed… the tyranny of the Medicis, a democratic government, occupations, wars and conspiracies; the active, demagogic and deeply medieval and reactionary democracy of Savonarola, the adventure of the exiles, etc. Thus, employed and dismissed, respected and persecuted, highly regarded and tortured, ignored and sought after, Machiavelli lived in his time and as his time.”

Perhaps the most lucid passages in Maneiro’s work are those in which he stops to analyze the question of method: “Machiavelli uses a method and makes it explicit”. Later he adds: “He is, moreover, fully aware of the importance of method and by making it explicit he not only does so thoroughly, but -and this is a constant in philosophers of praxis- he turns it into an argument: that is, he points out its advantages, having the peculiarity of being irrelevant and unattractive for speculation, but very strong and weighty for a criterion of action.”

Machiavelli does not act as a “moralist” nor does he write “pamphlet literature.” That is to say, “his explanations are not mutilated by the intention to convince, even though such intention is not only evident but also constitutes the ultimate and declared purpose of his work: he writes for understanding and also for action.”

That being said, contrary to the general opinion, Maneiro points out that what defines Machiavelli is not the fact that he rejects the politics of morality, but the politics of utopia, understood as “speculative opposition” against the status quo. In this regard, it is worth remembering that the Florentine intellectual lived in “an era in which the powerful and brilliant speculative tradition forced advanced social theory to tread in utopias”.

From a historical standpoint, Maneiro continues, utopia “is to the philosophy of praxis and political science what alchemy is to chemistry. Machiavelli’s true relationship with political theory is not, as practically all those who have considered the subject say, to separate it from morality but, in fact, to separate it from utopia, and it was for this reason and this alone that he turned it into a science.”

Finally, a brief comment on Machiavelli and his alleged “cynicism” in politics, an assessment closely associated with a phrase often attributed to him: “the end justifies the means.” In this regard, Maneiro writes: “I confess that I have not found the so hackneyed and Machiavellian phrase in Machiavelli’s work. What I have found is something formally similar but substantially opposite. It is the following: ‘No wise man will censure the use of some extraordinary step to found a kingdom or organize a republic; but it suits the founder that when the fact accuses him, the result excuses him’.” Maneiro dwells on the “but”: “As it is placed, it would seem to open a sentence of the type: but not any step, or, but not in all circumstances or, in short, something to that effect. In any case, the ‘but’ implies an essential precision. And what follows indicates that it is not a question of the ‘end’ as a justification of the means… but of the result.”

Far from being anecdotal, this “essential precision” acquires even more importance coming from an author who, like Maneiro, went on to define the concepts of “political efficacy” and “revolutionary quality”. In speaking of the former, he referred to “the capacity of any political organization to become a real alternative of government”, for which it must “offer a possible, coherent and comprehensive solution to the stagnant and permanent Venezuelan underdevelopment issues.”

As for the second, he defined it as “the probable capacity of its members to participate in an effort aimed at the transformation of society, at the creation of a new system of human relations.” In other words, a political organization may well be politically effective and not only “become a real alternative of government” but also take power. But power is neither an end in itself nor is it appropriate to resort to any means to preserve it. Power only makes sense, from Maneiro’s perspective, if it is exercised with “revolutionary quality.”

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2024/06/ ... y-quality/

[blindpig]

Conversations about important things

Before we begin our conversation with WHAT WE ARE - and this is the natural beginning of any worldview - it is imperative to understand what the surrounding world is.

The thing is that humans, by universal standards, have not appeared that long ago. Not that long ago even by the standards of our planet's existence. The world existed, spun, twirled and seethed before humans gradually populated the planet.

Therefore, before thinking about who you are, why you are here and who needs you, what your meaning and purpose are, it would be good to understand the meaning of being itself (being = what is).

*
What is the world we live in?

It is easy to see that the universe, the stars, the cosmic and natural processes on our planet are deeply indifferent to the fate of humanity and the lives of individuals. There is no meaningfulness in the universe itself, its existence proceeds absolutely objectively ( = independently of consciousness, any! ), through the collision of various forces, opposing principles.

The simplest and most visual description of the external world is mechanical interaction: everything moves somewhere, collides, collapses, merges, energy is transferred from one body to another, complex bodies are formed from simple ones ( complex means composed of simple ones), then they disintegrate , etc., etc. And everything is made up of each other, like a nesting doll.

Organisms disintegrate into various systems and life apparatuses, those into complex substances, complex substances into simple substances, simple substances into molecules and atoms, molecules and atoms into lighter and simpler atoms, and those, in turn, into even smaller elements, and so on ad infinitum.

That is, everything complex and large is a certain organization of something simpler and smaller .

Moreover, each level of organization has its own specifics, its own laws and patterns, its own logic of things and processes.

Science currently identifies several levels of such organization.

1. Physical . It all starts with the microworld. This is a sphere of global scale. Space is an endless sea of ​​extremely fine gaseous matter filling all space, which is called ether. Streams of ether move in a spiral to the centers of galaxies. There they collide at great speed, and thus streams of protons, neutrons and radiation from the centers of galaxies to their outskirts are formed.

The movement of ether to the center of galaxies and from the center of galaxies in the form of protons, neutrons and radiation gives rise to all known phenomena of the microworld from gravity, light, electromagnetic radiation to the processes of formation of stars, planets and other cosmic bodies.

These are monstrously gigantic scales with huge time intervals. It takes billions of years for a galaxy to form.

The speed at which the ether moves is not yet known for certain, but protons and radiation from the center of the galaxy move at the speed of light. This is very fast for us and very slow relative to the distances of the galaxies themselves.

In general, we see light at a distance of 14 billion years of its movement, then photons are destroyed by friction with the surrounding ether and the impact of other external forces. To the center of our galaxy, and it is far from the largest, almost 30 thousand light years (that is, now we see the center of the Milky Way as it was at the time when people were just domesticating dogs). It is clear that the speed of movement of protons, neutrons and radiation, from which stars, planets and all bodies are formed, compared to the scale of space, is quite low. Therefore, transformation and changes in space occur very, very, very slowly. Although we on Earth are excited by the thought that light, heat and other rays from the Sun reach us in just eight minutes.

2. Chemical . This is a much more complex level of organization, when we are talking about substances, that is, about the combination of complex, large atoms and molecules. In space, there are very few substances as such, if we do not count stars and planets. Substances are formed on celestial bodies.

3. Biological . This is a super-complex level of organization, when organisms are born from the most complex organic substances, through their intricate interweaving, i.e. life appears. The essence of life is that living organisms exist through the exchange of substances with their environment.

4. Social . This is humanity - a particularly complex form of life, which, unlike everything else, suddenly began to think about the meaning of existence.

For each more complex level of organization, the previous ones represent, firstly, the building material of which it consists, and secondly, the environment (conditions) of existence or habitation .

Thus,

1) for us, people in general, the plant and animal world is what we consist of and what we live in the environment of;

2) for us, humans as biological organisms, substances and their compounds are what we are made of and how and where we exist;

3) for us, people as a certain set of chemical apparatuses of life activity, the physical world and cosmic processes are what forms us, and the environment in which we exist.

It's all pretty simple to understand and extremely difficult to grasp. But it makes sense, right?

What has been said is not an opinion, not some model that approximately explains the observed, not a hypothesis or guess, but a scientific conclusion based on the entirety of social practice. On those thousands of years of human existence that have given billions of facts, observations, experiments. First of all, on the practice of human reproduction itself, that is, the process of life and death, the production of material and spiritual goods and their consumption, as its basis.

Scientific knowledge is distinguished from everything else by its adequacy , i.e. strict correspondence to objective reality. All this is verified by the very practice of humanity, production, discoveries, research, etc.

Note that scientific knowledge is the exact opposite of NOT ignorance, as it may seem, because scientific knowledge fully assumes that we may not yet know something. Scientific knowledge is the opposite of faith . If you believe in something, this definitely means only one thing - that you do not know. It is impossible to believe in knowledge, because knowledge is confirmed in practice, therefore, there is no room for faith. If we do not yet know something, then we can assume, build hypotheses and guesses on the basis of existing knowledge. They must be completely scientific and also not connected with faith. Where there is faith, there can be no science. This is the most important axiom of knowledge.

I
So, if we take a fresh look at the entire Matryoshka-like universe, in which the simple is combined into the complex, and the complex exists in the simple, we can discover several important conclusions, laws that are equally significant for all spheres of knowledge, for everything in general. They constitute the fundamental basis of a scientific, i.e. adequate, worldview and methodology of thinking.

People who think and live with mush in their heads instead of a worldview, do not see anything further than their noses. They reason exclusively within the framework of the ordinary, within the framework of everyday practice. They are afraid of the universal, they are afraid of methodology and any fundamental knowledge. Usually they try to explain everything beyond their immediate everyday experience mystically, relying on various mystical ideologies, for example, religion. Religion gives an anti-scientific, unreasonable, faith-based, i.e. illogical, explanation of the essence of the world. But the bourgeoisie and ordinary people usually do not even know the theoretical foundations of religion. They live with petty everyday questions, superstitions, signs and prayers are enough for them.

Most people turn into such people at your age, so you need to educate yourself, think and think, work with your head, work on yourself, study, study, study. There are social reasons for turning into a philistine, it is beneficial to certain social forces, because the dumber people are, the narrower their worldview, the easier it is to exploit, oppress and deceive them.

They say that the sleep of reason produces monsters. Total ignorance, especially in matters of social science, produces not only monsters like mass murderers, terrorists, sadists and psychopaths, but also a swamp of indifferent philistines.

Most of these people have a short memory for social events, because they perceive all information only in direct relation to the vector of their life. These people say: "Why do I need to know this?", "Physics will not be useful to me in life", "What benefit can I get from this?" etc. Their natural curiosity, which underlies a healthy need for knowledge, is dulled to the level of passive curiosity. Such people have enough rumors, gossip, memes, jokes, secrets, especially if they imply that other people are doing even worse and they are even bigger clowns and idiots. This is not only meaningless, but also morbid curiosity. However, in each of us, one way or another, there is curiosity and inquisitiveness. The problem is in the balance and dynamics of this balance.

There is nothing sadder than living a life full of emotions from curiosity, fashion, shopaholism, comfort and idleness. It is not only boring, pathetic and mentally unhealthy, but also undermines the very high title of man. Such a life is little like a human one. In general, theoretical activity is the most important form of human practice in general. If you want to be a human, do not neglect scientific and theoretical activity, at least to fill your consciousness with adequate knowledge. And all these boring depressions and sick perversions are the usual swinishness of the philistine.

But it is important to understand the criticism of the philistine not in the form of contempt and hatred for others, for this is a superficial judgment in the style of the philistine. Curiosity differs from inquisitiveness primarily not in its subject, but in that the latter seeks to penetrate to the cause. As stated above, philistinism and ignorance have social roots, i.e. there are social forces that benefit from this, therefore they form the corresponding conditions, education, etc. Why in the information space around you there is 1% scientific knowledge and 99% garbage in the form of propaganda of egoism, exploitation of base instincts, mysticism and other nonsense? Moreover, the production of everything - from books, television and the Internet to the content of lessons and social events - is paid for by someone. Even if you buy it yourself, it was produced in advance with the purpose of forming a market and the illusion of choice. So think about it. And sooner or later you realize that mass ignorance is an integral element of society in the system of private property relations. And philistinism is just another form of ignorance. Without fools, there can be no slavery, feudalism, or capitalism. Therefore, the production of stupidity and fools is an important element in maintaining the economic and political system.

And this, by the way, is favored by the very structure of consciousness. The fact is that thinking arose as an objective necessity of adaptation of mankind to the environment. Thinking was initially active and was aimed at daily solution of specific problems of survival of an individual organism and a community of people. Consequently, with the development of society, division of labor, growth of technologies, change of life, etc., the daily need to think with the head ceased to be so urgent. Today, in order to “live normally” in an averagely developed country, it is possible to practically not think with the head at all. Because of this, firstly, the potential of thinking degrades, secondly, it is much more difficult for an individual to force himself to think. This is precisely why it is necessary to constantly study, constantly think with the head and study theory.

So, how to approach the fundamental foundations of existence?

We should start with a simple reasoning.

We see a huge diversity of phenomena and processes of space, nature, substances, animals (we will not include society here for now, since we are talking about the world around us, and not about us). All of them, since they constitute the diversity of being, must have something in common at their core . All of them, to a man, must be identical in what allows them to constitute the unity of being .

So what is the unity of the world? Why is everything that exists, in this world and makes up this world?

This is a philosophical question, and the answer to it cannot be found by cutting up frogs, excavating, or traveling into outer space. It is derived logically, i.e., on the one hand, on the basis of a strict generalization of all the facts, on the other - the utmost conscientious adherence to the very laws of thinking: so that there are no foreign admixtures of ideas, one is derived from another, nothing contradicts each other. In general, scientific thinking is conscientious thinking, which excludes any faith, mysticism, stretching, emotions, passions, careerism and, most importantly, interests. A scientist has one need - to find out the truth .

Thus, the unity of the world consists in its materiality . The identity of all that exists consists in its materiality. Everything real, existing, having existed and will exist is material.

"Matter" is a word whose meaning is that something was, is, or will be in reality. Everything that exists is one or another form of matter in one or another degree of organization.

Further, we cannot simply be satisfied with the fact that matter exists . We must understand how exactly it exists.

The fact is that material objects and processes constantly arise and disappear , everything that exists has its beginning, its blossoming, its decay and its end. Existence is not only appearance, birth, but also disappearance. Life is replaced by death, and death by life. Life, some grimly joke, is only dying.

There is some movement in this , at least from the beginning to the end of each particular thing and from the “end” to the birth of something new.

Further, material objects and processes do not exist in isolation. As we have found out, the unity of the world consists in its materiality and therefore unity is manifested in everything material. What is unity? It is a combination of the different , the opposite. All material objects are different from each other, but their identity consists at least in the fact that they are material objects. This means that they interact with each other (after all, we are talking about the CONNECTION of the different). Moreover, their interaction, mutual influence on each other, is the main factor in their movement from birth to disappearance and birth of something new.

All material objects and processes can be considered as the mechanics of being, i.e. in everything real we will see movement, collision (interaction), influence on each other, connection and disintegration . Everything that exists can at least be considered from the point of view of mechanics.

From what has been said it follows that movement is the mode of existence of matter . Matter is always moving, rest is only relative. There is no absolute rest and there cannot be. Movement is the process of existence of matter, material forms and formations. Even your consciousness is a constant movement of thought, you cannot stop thinking for a second. Even when you sleep, your brain carries out thought work outside of awareness.

Moreover, each new level of organization of matter gives its own specific type of movement, in addition to simple displacement and collision.

The chemical form of motion is those qualitative changes that occur in the molecules of substances as a result of the movement of atoms .

The biological form of movement is those qualitative changes that arise as a result of the metabolism of the organism and the external environment (also movement).

And society has its own special form of social movement, the process of its existence.

In short, everything that exists moves, and the measure of this movement is such a concept as energy .

Even this text is a form of material movement. The energy of the neurons of my brain not only formulates thoughts, but also sets the muscles of the body in motion, thus creating a text that you read through a similar apparatus of your body. If, as a result of assimilating the text of the letter, you commit certain actions, then it will also become a form of social movement, provided that their consequences are significant. It is unlikely that Pushkin, when he wrote "Eugene Onegin", could have imagined what "social energy" the trivial story he told would have. And in fact, it has a major influence on young people's ideas about love, even if they have never read the work itself.

Further. We began to understand existence by fixing matter, the mode of existence of which is movement. Matter moves, thus all the diversity of its forms, elements exists through birth, blossoming, withering and death with a new birth, colliding, forming more complex forms from the simple and disintegrating into the simple from the complex .

But to say that everything that exists is material and moves is not enough. We need to go deeper. What exactly does materiality mean? How exactly does materiality manifest itself?

Everything material has a characteristic that gives us scientific categories of all forms of matter. Everything material has a material character.

1 . This means that all elements and "units" of matter have mass. "Mass" is a concept that expresses the amount of matter: how much or how little matter makes up an object or process. If we observe a real phenomenon but cannot record its mass, then we are dealing with a disturbance, a wave of the material environment. In a continuous environment, motion can be transmitted from one element to another without their significant displacement, like a wave in water.

In short, everything that exists has mass and nothing else. If someone claims that something has no mass, then they are trying to deceive you.

2 . The material nature of matter also means that everything is a whole for its constituent elements and a part of something greater. Everything has some structure, internal organization and is connected in a certain way with everything else. There are no bodies or phenomena that consist of themselves, are the first cause of themselves or are not connected with anything. If someone claims such a thing, you are being deceived.

3 . Further, the material nature of matter means that everything has form and content, i.e. its structure contains elements responsible for external boundaries (form) and internal boundaries (content). When we say about something "what is it?", we mean its content. When we say about something "what is it like?", we mean its form. Form is always meaningful, and content is always somehow formed. Form and content correspond to each other. If the content changes, then the form will also change, but not immediately. If external forces change the form, the content will be forced to adapt to these changes. If someone claims that something has no form or no content, then they are trying to deceive you.

All these are logical conclusions based on human experience, on active interaction with the surrounding world (production, experiments, observations) and within society itself. These are irrefutable, absolute truths.

If we dig even deeper than the material nature of matter, we will notice that the entire diversity of forms of matter, objects, processes appears in the form of qualitative and quantitative moments. In everything we can find 1) uniqueness, dissimilarity, distinctiveness from everything in general and 2) identity, similarity with this or that. The category of quality expresses the first, quantity - the second.

For example, the quality of you as a person is what distinguishes you from all people and from all things in the universe. And quantity is the connection of you into some identical groups. Let's say you are first of all a person, and there are almost 8 billion people today. You belong to the Russian culture, as do 250 million people, etc. But any quality can be broken down into a number of some constituent qualities. Let's say the quality of your personality is represented first of all by a certain number of correct and incorrect actions, good and evil done, decency and meanness. And so on. Likewise, your organism is a certain number of certain systems and apparatuses of life activity, limbs, bones, tissues, etc.

However, quality is primary , and quantity is always the similarity of some qualities . If you have ten plums on the table in front of you, then all these plums are different, but they are all plums.

The question arises, how and why do some things and processes collide and form something new, while others do not? Or, conversely, why does something, under the influence of external forces, disintegrate into simpler components ?

Quality is the certainty of things, processes . The result of this interaction depends on the interaction of different qualities.

For simplicity of logical illustration of these processes the following verbal explanation is offered: all qualities represent OPPOSITES relative to each other , and their collision, i.e. interaction (mutual reflection), is the UNITY that they constitute. If this unity during the collision links them together, then we have before us the formation of something new, more complex. If this unity during the collision does not link them, then their potentials and vectors simply change. Sometimes one destroys the other.

An example can be given not only from physics or chemistry, but also from everyday life. For example, you as a person interact with another person as a person. You are opposites. Your unity is manifested in interaction, in communication, but above all in common activities. Some friction occurs, "exchange of social energy", and the more of it, the wider and longer the practice, the more this clash becomes unity. As a result, either you become friends, i.e. form something new, a fellowship of two people, or someone will only somehow influence someone. Or maybe it will end in a conflict, a struggle of characters and even a fight. The same thing happens in the interaction of an individual and a group.

By the way, interaction in the universe is always a mutual reflection of things, processes, phenomena . The word "reflection" is used here because later, at higher levels of matter organization, interaction through collision plays a key role in the development of biological and social forms of matter.

Further. More questions arise: what is all matter, the entirety of the material world as a whole? Where is it located and relative to what does it change?

This is how we approach space and time.

The point is that matter does not simply exist through movement, it moves in space and changes in time. Space is, in fact, the receptacle of matter . It itself is immaterial and absolute, like time. Time is pure immaterial movement, relative to which all changes in the world occur .

If space and time are immaterial, insubstantial, how can we assert that they exist, that they constitute elements of being? Only indirectly through matter. Matter must move in something and change in motion relative to something absolute. It is unthinkable otherwise. Moreover, space and time are infinite, that is, they have neither beginning nor end. Consequently, matter, which fills all space and exists in time, is infinite, has neither beginning nor end, and, therefore, is indestructible. The latter is clearly confirmed in practice by the law of conservation of energy. And the infinity of space and time confirms everything observed in general, if we approach it conscientiously and sensibly.

Some people say, "I can't imagine infinity." But if you think about it carefully, if you think hard, you'll realize that, on the contrary, it's impossible to imagine anything absolutely finite.

Here is something and now it is gone. And what is left? Emptiness? But there is no emptiness in nature, it is even unthinkable. Emptiness is imagined as an empty box or some kind of vacuum. Now there is something - a box or a vacuum, they at least have some boundaries and volume. Even mathematical "emptiness", i.e. zero, is already something. It is zero. It exists as a "mathematical reality", it has its own symbol "0", etc.

In short, the universe is infinite, space is infinite, time is infinite, and matter moving in space and existing in time is infinite. And therefore, the forms and varieties of matter are also infinite. The universe has no beginning and will have no end. All the concrete forms of matter that appear and disappear are finite .

From this, for example, follows the conclusion that there are no gods or higher powers, that somewhere in the universe there is necessarily life, including intelligent life. But the main thing: everything that will be, has already happened . But at the same time, everything that was, and everything that will be, has always happened and will happen in a unique form . Just as in the universe there are no two absolutely identical things, no two absolutely identical atoms, but all things are similar to one degree or another, identical. So all events, on the one hand, are unique, on the other - they repeat each other.

So.

Matter is infinite.

It's moving.

Moves in infinite space and changes in infinitely flowing time.

It is a thing, i.e. it has mass, form, content, is a whole and a part of something bigger.

Material forms interact as opposites and sometimes form stable unities.

These are the main characteristics of material forms and their movement in space and time.

If you learn these axioms of materialism, comprehend their deep content, then you will receive in your worldview a logical "coordinate axis" for a quick, almost intuitive primary scientific examination of any theoretical calculations. If some ideas contradict the above, then they are anti-scientific, if not, then they are possibly true.

The time will come when these foundations will be studied from the earliest years of life. In a thousand years, it will be difficult for people to imagine that in our era we somehow lived without a scientific-materialistic worldview, just as it is surprising today to realize how ignorant the medieval masses were, applauding the burning of yet another witch or yet another Giordano Bruno.

(Much more, read it. A long, precise walk to materialism.)

https://prorivists.org/serious/

Google Translator

[blindpig]

Against Žižek’s Pessimism: Hope, Will, and the Dialectics of Liberation
By Tunç Türel (Posted Mar 14, 2025)

Slavoj Žižek, one of the Western thinkers who is familiar with Marxist terminology, published an article in Philosophy Salon on January 27, 2025, entitled “Why a Communist Must Assume that Life is Hell.”1 In it, Žižek argues that communists should turn their backs on humanist optimism and embrace radical pessimism, seeing life as an immanent “valley of tears” rather than a process shaped by historical forces. Drawing on the philosopher Philipp Mainländer, he argues that suffering is not just a product of alienation, but is at the core of existence. Drawing on Brassier’s reinterpretation of Marx, Žižek argues that capitalism “neutralizes” human potential but paradoxically produces the revolutionary subject. Seeing Mainländer’s nihilism as a call for radical engagement, Žižek portrays communism ultimately as a coping mechanism to alleviate the pain inherent in life.

Before I try to explain why the ideas in Žižek’s article constitute a dead end in terms of the historical and dialectical materialist method and then try to refute his thesis by drawing inspiration from Marc Bloch’s “Principle of Hope”, Antonio Gramsci’s “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” and the Marxist video game Disco Elysium, I think it would be useful to take a brief look at Philipp Mainländer, who inspired Žižek here.

Mainländer, who lived between 1841 and 1876, was a German philosopher and poet known for his radical pessimism, who both built upon and distorted the ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer, reduced the philosopher’s thought into a metaphysical nihilism. In contrast to Schopenhauer’s will to live, Mainländer argued that existence was driven by a will to die – a cosmic suicide initiated by God himself. For him, the world was nothing but the rotting corpse of a dead god, and existence was an inevitable march towards self-destruction.

Yet for all his bleak ontology, Mainländer was paradoxically a champion of socialism, feminism and workers’ rights. This aspect of Mainländer’s work naturally attracted the likes of August Bebel and Eduard Bernstein to his ideas. However, Mainländer’s philosophy was ultimately idealistic, treating suffering as an ontological datum rather than a historically conditioned phenomenon.

The Misery of Diluting Marxism
But why can Žižek’s above-mentioned attempt be characterized as a metaphysical dead end in terms of historical and dialectical materialism?

First of all, Žižek portrays communism not as the historical solution to the class struggle but as a response to an inevitable cosmic despair, i.e. he assigns communism a completely different role. However, historical materialism sees suffering not as an immanent feature of existence, but as a product of specific economic and social relations. By arguing that suffering is not historically contingent but ontologically primary, Žižek slips into idealism, exactly what we Marxists oppose.

Second, whereas Marxists conceive alienation as a historically specific phenomenon arising under capitalism due to private property and the division of labor, Žižek treats alienation as an intrinsic feature of human existence rather than a problem that can be overcome through revolutionary transformation. This leads him to a fatalistic view that denies the possibility of communism as a project of human emancipation.

Third, Žižek argues in his article that capitalism is not only a historically contingent formation, but also an inevitable process that “creates the subject” of revolution. But while Marx recognized the role of capitalism in developing the material conditions for socialism, he never saw it as a metaphysically necessary or eternal form. Dialectical materialism emphasizes the internal contradictions – exploitation, crises and class struggle – that drive capitalism to its overthrow, not its supposed role in “revealing” the horrors of existence.

Fourth, Marxism does not propose an idealized, naïve humanism, but recognizes human potential as something shaped by historical conditions. By rejecting the idea that people have any innate capacity for solidarity and cooperation, Žižek denies the basis for revolutionary struggle. This is in direct opposition to Marx’s understanding of human beings as socially and historically constituted beings with the capacity to recreate both themselves and the world.

Finally, dialectical materialism is a method that analyzes contradictions in order to transform them. Žižek, however, treats the contradiction as an eternal wound – that is, as something to be endured rather than resolved through revolutionary praxis. Consequently, Mainländer’s fusion of his nihilism with Marxism results in a static, defeatist perspective that deprives communism of its historical dynamism.

Mainländer’s pessimism rejects the dialectical movement of history and reduces human agency to a tragic attempt to manage an inevitable decline. His brief flirtation with leftist ideas lacks a materialist basis; his leftism is an emotional, existential revolt rather than a rigorous analysis of the class struggle. In short, Mainländer is a symptom of bourgeois decadence – his despair reflects the crisis of a decadent aristocratic order unable to grasp the revolutionary potential of the proletariat.

Žižek’s attempt to bring Mainländer into Marxist discourse is therefore futile. Whereas Mainländer sees suffering as eternal, Marxism sees it as historically produced and therefore historically solvable. Revolution is not a melancholy task in a meaningless universe; it is a conscious struggle to transform social conditions and unleash the true potential of man. In contrast, Mainländer offers almost nothing but a surrender disguised as radicalism.

Plekhanov wrote in 1892, in response to the question of whether the materialist understanding of history could be combined with Kant’s teachings, the following words, which are still valid today, about thinkers and so-called opinion leaders who try to satisfy everyone’s taste buds by adding a little of this and a little of that (and ending up leaving everyone hungry) to the views of Marx and Lenin:

“Eclectic thinkers can, of course, fuse and combine everything in their minds. With eclectic thinking you can fuse not only Marx and Kant, but even Marx and medieval “realist” thinkers. But for coherent thinkers, the illegal union of Marx with Kant’s philosophy must be regarded as something monstrous in the full sense of the word.”2

Thus, by blending Marxism with the philosophical pessimism of Philipp Mainländer, Žižek dilutes the revolutionary optimism inherent in historical materialism. The claim that communism must accept the “inherent hopelessness of the human condition” is not only theoretically erroneous but also politically disarming. Marxism is not a philosophy of despair; it is a science, a guide to action, based on a dialectical understanding of history and the transformative potential of collective struggle. To counter Žižek’s pessimism, we can now take a brief look at the revolutionary optimism of Ernst Bloch, the Gramscian dialectics of reason and will, and the Marxist critique embodied in cultural works such as Disco Elysium.

Principle of Hope: Communism as Becoming
This fatalistic reading of Žižek is at odds with Bloch’s “Principle of Hope”, which sees history as an open-ended process in which people collectively construct their future. For Bloch, hope is not pure optimism but a necessary dialectical force; it recognizes the horrors of the present but insists that they can be transformed.

Žižek’s Mainländer assumes that the sufferings of capitalism are somehow metaphysically immanent rather than historically specific. The idea that “non-being is preferable to being” is a reactionary rejection of the dialectical process – Marxist hope is about struggle, negation and becoming, whereas Mainländer proposes only resignation.

Žižek dismisses the “implicit humanist optimism of the standard left” – the belief that human beings have the potential for a happy life, solidarity and cooperation – as a naive fantasy. But this optimism is not naïve; it is dialectical. It is rooted in the material conditions of human existence and the historical possibilities they contain. Marxism does not deny the reality of suffering and despair under the capitalist mode of production, but it finds their source not in an immanent “human nature” but in the alienated social relations of capitalist production.

Bloch argues that hope is not a passive wish, but an active, dialectical force arising from the contradictions of material reality. The suffering and despair of capitalist alienation are not eternal realities, but historical conditions that can be overcome through revolutionary struggle. To abandon hope, Žižek argues, is to abandon the possibility of liberation.

As such, Bloch’s concept of hope is fundamentally incompatible with Žižek’s pessimism. Where Žižek sees life as a “valley of tears”, Bloch sees it as a potential site of transformation. For Bloch, the contradictions of capitalism – exploitation, alienation and dispossession – are not only sources of suffering, but also the seeds of liberation. Just like “the seeds” in the Greek poet Dinos Christianopoulos’ couplet “They Tried to Bury Us; They Didn’t Know We Were Seeds”. And as Bloch wrote, “Thinking means venturing beyond.” By contrast, Žižek’s pessimism traps us in a static, hopeless worldview and denies the possibility of revolutionary change.

Optimism of the Will: Revolution as Action
Gramsci’s famous maxim “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” offers a dialectical approach to struggle that Žižek’s article fails to grasp. “Pessimism of the intellect” means a sober analysis of the harsh realities of capitalist exploitation and oppression. “Optimism of the will” means maintaining the revolutionary conviction that these conditions can and must be changed. This dialectic is essential to Marxist praxis because it balances a clear-eyed grasp of the present with an unwavering commitment to the future.

In his essay, Žižek turns this dialectic into a one-sided (if a one-sided dialectic is even possible!) pessimism. By adopting Mainländer’s view that life is inherently hellish, Žižek abandons the optimism of the will, the belief that collective struggle can transform the world. This is not only theoretically erroneous, but also politically dangerous. As Gramsci understood, revolutionary movements are sustained by the belief that a better world is possible. By denying this possibility, Žižek’s pessimism disarms the working class and undermines the struggle for liberation.

Yes, we must recognize the brutality of capitalist reality (pessimism of the intellect), but the point is not to surrender to it as a cosmic inevitability. Instead, revolutionary action is sustained by the belief that this brutality is contingent and can be overthrown (optimism of the will). Žižek reduces the dialectic to a self-destructive void rather than an engine of transformation.

Disco Elysium: A Marxist Critique of Pessimism
Disco Elysium is a role-playing video game released in 2019. The fact that its Polish-based authors and producers openly declared themselves Marxist-Leninists, and that when their game took the gaming world by storm and won dozens of awards, they boldly thanked Marx and Engels for their ideological education in front of hundreds of CEOs and shareholders of the gaming industry at the most famous of these award ceremonies is not the point here.3 The point is that this video game offers a powerful cultural critique of pessimism and a reaffirmation of revolutionary hope. The game’s protagonist, Harry Du Bois, is a man struggling with despair, alienation and the weight of his own failures. Yet through his interactions with the people of Revachol, the city in which the game is set, he begins to find meaning in collective struggle and solidarity. Although the game is set in a dystopian world, this world is also a potential site of revolution, reflecting the dialectical tension between despair and hope.

If we take Disco Elysium as a lens, the protagonist – Harry Du Bois – embodies Žižek’s pessimistic figure: He is a decadent man living in a decaying, even rotten world. But Disco Elysium is not a game that ends in despair; it presents a world where solidarity, struggle and the dream of a better tomorrow remain real possibilities even in the midst of destruction. Even the “Doomed Commercial Area” in the game is doomed only because of the dominance of capital, not because the universe itself is collapsing under the weight of nihilism.

Like a cursory player who refuses to engage with the deeper options the game offers the player, Žižek insists that because life is hard, revolution is merely a melancholic task rather than a project of liberation. This is tantamount to choosing the “Give Up” dialog every time among the dozens of options given to the player in the game and claiming that this is something profound.

Disco Elysium is a work that embodies the Marxist critique of pessimism that is missing from Žižek’s essay. It shows that despair is not an internal state, but a product of capitalist alienation, and that hope arises from the struggle against this alienation. The game’s famous line “There is still time to change everything” captures the revolutionary optimism that Žižek’s pessimism rejects. In Disco Elysium, as in Marxism, the struggle for liberation is not just a response to suffering, but an affirmation of the possibility of a better world.

Dialectics of Liberation
Žižek’s claim that communism should be proposed as a “coping strategy” for unhappiness, like the descriptions of “happiness” in modern self-help books, lies in a profound misunderstanding of Marxism. Communism is not a coping mechanism; it is a revolutionary project that aims to eliminate the conditions that produce despair in the first place. The suffering and despair generated by capitalist alienation are not inherent to the human condition; they are products of a particular historical mode of production. To overcome them, we need not to “deal with” them, but to abolish the system that produces them.

Marxism teaches us that the contradictions of capitalism – exploitation, alienation and enslavement – are not eternal truths but historical conditions that can be overcome through revolutionary struggle. As Marx wrote, “Philosophers have only interpreted the world; the question is to change it.” By treating despair as an immanent condition, Žižek’s pessimism abandons this imperative and undermines the possibility of liberation.

Instead of Conclusion: Continue the Struggle
Zizek’s melancholic reading of communism is ultimately a depoliticizing move – it diminishes the urgency of revolutionary struggle and reduces it to a kind of existential therapy. In contrast, a dialectical materialist approach, based on Bloch, Gramsci and the lived experience of the struggle, sees communism not as a balm for an immutable cosmic tragedy, but as the historical project of human emancipation.

The pessimistic mood and understanding of human nature prevalent in most Western left and Marxist thinkers has undoubtedly influenced Žižek’s sympathy for Mainländer’s pessimism. Žižek’s call to “recognize the inherent hopelessness of the human condition” is not an isolated step; it must be seen as part of a broader trend within Western Marxism, especially among thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School. Before Žižek, figures such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse succumbed to a pessimistic view of human nature and history that reflected the despair of the Mainländer. This tendency, while rooted in a critique of capitalism, often veers into a metaphysical despair that undermines the revolutionary optimism at the heart of Marxism. A pessimism that presents communism not as a solution to a historically specific contradiction but only as a response to eternal suffering is reactionary, not revolutionary. If suffering is ontologically inevitable, then why fight for anything at all? Žižek’s position, wittingly or unwittingly, slips into an apolitical capitulation at this point: If capitalism and communism are different ways of dealing with universal despair, then why bother with revolution at all?

In short, the pessimism of Žižek and his ilk represents a profound break with the revolutionary optimism that is essential to Marxism. While such thinkers’ critiques of capitalism and cultural observations are valuable, their metaphysical despair undermines the possibility of liberation. Marxism is not a philosophy of despair; it is a science based on a dialectical understanding of history and the transformative potential of collective struggle. “Thinking means venturing beyond.” So let us go beyond the pessimism of Žižek and his ilk, never to look back, and internalize the revolutionary optimism that has guided and will continue to guide every liberation struggle. Or, in the language of Disco Elysium, let’s get rid of our obsession with reading bad news on social media for long hours (doomscrolling) and try to grow the working class movement.

Notes
1. https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/why-a ... e-is-hell/

2. Plekhanov, G., (1977), Notes to Engels’ Book Ludwig Feuerbafch, Selected Philosophical Works, Vol.1, Moskova, Progress Publishers, p. 465.

3. https://youtu.be/DOz4QcRZu_g?feature=shared&t=317

https://mronline.org/2025/03/14/against ... iberation/

[blindpig]

Conversations about important things

Before we begin our conversation with WHAT WE ARE - and this is the natural beginning of any worldview - it is imperative to understand what the surrounding world is.

The thing is that humans, by universal standards, have not appeared that long ago. Not that long ago even by the standards of our planet's existence. The world existed, spun, twirled and seethed before humans gradually populated the planet.

Therefore, before thinking about who you are, why you are here and who needs you, what is your meaning and purpose, it would be good to understand the meaning of being itself (being is everything that is).

*
What is the world we live in?

It is easy to see that the universe, the stars, the cosmic and natural processes on our planet are deeply indifferent to the fate of humanity and the lives of individuals. There is no meaningfulness in the universe itself, its existence proceeds absolutely objectively ( = independently of consciousness, any! ), through the collision of various forces, opposing principles.

The simplest and most visual description of the external world is mechanical interaction: everything moves somewhere, collides, collapses, merges, energy is transferred from one body to another, complex bodies are formed from simple bodies ( complex means composed of simple things), complex ones disintegrate , etc., etc. And everything consists of each other, like a nesting doll.

Organisms disintegrate into various systems and life apparatuses, which disintegrate into complex substances, complex substances into simple substances, simple substances into molecules and atoms, molecules and atoms into lighter and simpler atoms, and these, in turn, into even smaller elements, and so on ad infinitum.

That is, everything complex and large is a certain organization of something simpler and smaller .

Moreover, each level of organization has its own specifics, its own laws and patterns, its own logic of things and processes.

Science currently identifies several levels of such organization.

1. Physical . It all starts with the microworld. This is a sphere of global scale. Space is an endless sea of ​​extremely fine gaseous matter filling all space, called ether. Streams of ether move in a spiral to the centers of galaxies. There they collide at great speed, and thus streams of protons, neutrons and radiation from the centers of galaxies to their outskirts are formed.

The movement of ether to the center of galaxies and from the center of galaxies in the form of protons, neutrons and radiation gives rise to all known phenomena of the microworld from gravity, light, electromagnetic radiation to the processes of formation of stars, planets and other cosmic bodies.

These are monstrously gigantic scales with huge time intervals. It takes billions of years for a galaxy to form.

The speed at which the ether moves is not yet known for certain, but protons and radiation from the center of the galaxy move at the speed of light. This is very fast for us and very slow relative to the distances of the galaxies themselves.

We see light at a distance of 14 billion light years. This means that the photons have been flying to us for 14 billion years. During this time, they are gradually destroyed by friction with the surrounding ether and the influence of other external forces.

The center of our galaxy, which is far from the largest, is almost 30 thousand light years away (that is, we now see the center of the Milky Way as it was at the time when people were just domesticating dogs).

It is clear that the speed of movement of protons, neutrons and radiations, from which stars, planets and all bodies are formed, is quite low compared to the scale of space. Therefore, transformation and changes in space occur very, very, very slowly. Although we on Earth are excited by the thought that light, heat and other rays from the Sun reach us in just eight minutes.

2. Chemical . This is a much more complex level of organization, when we are talking about substances, that is, about the combination of complex, large atoms and molecules. In space, there are very few substances as such, if we do not count stars and planets. Substances are formed on celestial bodies.

3. Biological . This is a super-complex level of organization, when organisms are born from the most complex organic substances, through their intricate interweaving, i.e. life appears. The essence of life is that living organisms exist through the exchange of substances with their environment.

4. Social . This humanity is a particularly complex form of life. That is why we thought about the meaning of existence.

For each more complex level of organization, the previous ones represent, firstly, the building material of which it consists, and secondly, the environment (conditions) of existence or habitation .

Thus,

1) for us, people in general, the plant and animal world is what we consist of and what we live in the environment of;

2) for us, humans as biological organisms, substances and their compounds are what we are made of and how and where we exist;

3) for us, people as a certain set of chemical life apparatuses, the physical world and cosmic processes are what forms us, and the environment in which we exist.

It's all pretty simple to understand and extremely difficult to grasp. But it makes sense, right?

What has been said is not an opinion, not some model that approximately explains the observed, not a hypothesis or a guess, but a scientific conclusion from the entirety of social practice. From those thousands of years of human history that have given billions of facts, observations, experiments. First of all, from the practice of the reproduction of humanity itself, that is, the process of life and death, production and consumption of material and spiritual goods.

Scientific knowledge is distinguished from everything else by its adequacy , i.e. strict correspondence to objective reality. All this is verified by the very practice of humanity, production, discoveries, research, etc.

Note that scientific knowledge is the exact opposite of NOT ignorance, as it may seem, because scientific knowledge fully assumes that we may not yet know something. Scientific knowledge is the opposite of faith . If you believe in something, it definitely means only one thing - that you do not know (therefore believing is stupid).

It is impossible to believe in knowledge, because knowledge is confirmed in practice, therefore, there is no room for faith. If we do not know something yet, then we can assume, build hypotheses and guesses on the basis of the knowledge we already have. They must be completely scientific and also not connected with faith. Where there is faith, there can be no science. This is the most important axiom of knowledge.

I
So, if we take a fresh look at the entire Matryoshka-like universe, in which the simple is combined into the complex, and the complex exists in the simple, we can discover several important conclusions, laws that are equally significant for all spheres of knowledge, for everything in general. They constitute the fundamental basis of a scientific, i.e. adequate, worldview and methodology of thinking.

People who think and live with mush in their heads instead of a worldview, do not see anything further than their noses. They reason exclusively within the framework of the ordinary, within the framework of everyday practice. They are afraid of the universal, they are afraid of methodology and any fundamental knowledge. Usually they try to explain everything beyond their immediate everyday experience mystically, relying on various mystical ideologies, for example, religion. Religion gives an anti-scientific, unreasonable, faith-based, i.e. illogical, explanation of the essence of the world. But the bourgeoisie and ordinary people usually do not even know the theoretical foundations of religion. They live with petty everyday questions, superstitions, signs and prayers are enough for them.

Most people turn into such people at your age, so you need to educate yourself, think and think, work with your head, work on yourself, study, study, study. There are social reasons for turning into a philistine, it is beneficial to certain social forces, because the dumber people are, the narrower their worldview, the easier it is to exploit, oppress and deceive them.

They say that the sleep of reason produces monsters. Total ignorance, especially in matters of social science, produces not only monsters like mass murderers, terrorists, sadists and psychopaths, but also a swamp of indifferent philistines.

Most of these people have a short memory for social events, because they perceive all information only in direct relation to the vector of their life. These people say: "Why do I need to know this?", "Physics will not be useful to me in life", "What benefit can I get from this?" etc. Their natural curiosity, which underlies a healthy need for knowledge, is dulled to the level of passive curiosity. Such people have enough rumors, gossip, memes, jokes, secrets, especially if it follows from them that other people are doing even worse and they are even bigger clowns and idiots. This is not only meaningless, but also morbid curiosity. However, in each one, one way or another, there is curiosity and inquisitiveness. The problem is in the balance and dynamics of this balance.

There is nothing sadder than living a life full of emotions from curiosity, fashion, shopaholism, comfort and idleness. It is not only boring, pathetic and mentally unhealthy, but also undermines the very high title of man. Such a life is little like a human one. In general, theoretical activity is the most important form of human practice in general. If you want to be a real person, do not neglect scientific and theoretical activity, at least to fill your consciousness with adequate knowledge. And all these boring depressions and sick perversions are the usual swinishness of the philistine.

But it is important to understand the criticism of the philistine not in the form of contempt and hatred for others, for this is a superficial judgment in the style of the philistine. Curiosity differs from inquisitiveness primarily not in its subject, but in that the latter seeks to penetrate to the cause. As stated above, philistinism and ignorance have social roots, i.e. there are social forces that benefit from this, therefore they form the corresponding conditions, education, etc. Why in the information space around you there is 1% scientific knowledge and 99% garbage in the form of propaganda of egoism, exploitation of base instincts, mysticism and other nonsense? Moreover, the production of everything - from books, television and the Internet to the content of lessons and social events - is paid for by someone. Even if you buy it yourself, it was produced in advance with the purpose of forming a market and the illusion of choice. So think about it. And sooner or later you realize that mass ignorance is an integral element of society in the system of private property relations. And philistinism is just another form of ignorance. Without fools there can be no slavery, feudalism and capitalism. Therefore, the production of stupidity and fools is an important element in maintaining the economic and political system.

And this, by the way, is favored by the very structure of consciousness. The fact is that thinking arose as an objective necessity of adaptation of mankind to the environment. Thinking was initially active and was aimed at daily solution of specific problems of survival of an individual organism and a community of people. Consequently, with the development of society, division of labor, growth of technologies, change of life, etc., the daily need to think with the head ceased to be so urgent. Today, in order to “live normally” in an averagely developed country, it is possible to practically not think with the head at all. Because of this, firstly, the potential of thinking degrades, secondly, it is much more difficult for an individual to force himself to think. This is precisely why it is necessary to constantly study, constantly think with the head and study theory.

So, how to approach the fundamental foundations of existence?

We should start with a simple reasoning.

We see a huge variety of phenomena and processes of space, nature, substances, animals (we will not include society here for now, since we are talking about the world around us, and not about us). All of them constitute the diversity of being. Therefore, they must have something in common at their core . All of them, to a single one, must be identical in what allows them to constitute the unity of being .

So what is the unity of the world? Why is everything that exists, in this world and makes up this world?

This is a philosophical question, and the answer to it cannot be found by cutting up frogs, excavating, or traveling into outer space. It is derived logically, i.e., on the one hand, on the basis of a strict generalization of all the facts, on the other - the utmost conscientious adherence to the very laws of thinking: so that there are no foreign admixtures of ideas, one is derived from another, nothing contradicts each other. In general, scientific thinking is conscientious thinking, which excludes any faith, mysticism, stretching, emotions, passions, careerism and, most importantly, interests. A scientist has one need - to find out the truth .

Thus, the unity of the world consists in its materiality . The identity of all that exists consists in its materiality. Everything real, existing, having existed and will exist in the future is material.

"Matter" is a word whose meaning is that something was, is, or will be in reality. Everything that exists is one or another form of matter of one or another level of organization.

Further, we cannot simply be satisfied with the fact that matter exists . We must understand how exactly it exists.

The fact is that material objects and processes constantly arise and disappear , everything that exists has its beginning, its blossoming, its decay and its end. Existence is not only appearance, birth, but also disappearance. Life is replaced by death, and death by life. Life, some grimly joke, is only dying.

There is some movement in this , at least from the beginning to the end of each particular thing, which becomes the starting point for the birth of something new.

Further, material objects and processes do not exist in isolation. As we have found out, the unity of the world consists in its materiality and therefore unity is manifested in everything material. What is unity? It is the combination of the different , the opposite. All material objects are different from each other (there is nothing absolutely identical in the world!), but their identity consists at least in the fact that they are material objects. This means that they interact with each other (after all, we are talking about the CONNECTION of the different). Moreover, their interaction, mutual influence on each other, is the main factor in their movement from birth to disappearance and the birth of something new.

All material objects and processes can be considered as the mechanics of being, i.e. in everything real we will see movement, collision (interaction), influence on each other, connection and disintegration . Everything that exists can at least be considered from the point of view of mechanics.

From what has been said it follows that movement is the mode of existence of matter . Matter is always moving, rest is only relative. There is no absolute rest and there cannot be. Movement is the process of existence of matter, material forms and formations. Even your consciousness is a constant movement of thought, you cannot stop thinking for a second. Even when you sleep, your brain carries out thought work outside of awareness.

Moreover, each new level of organization of matter gives its own specific type of movement, in addition to simple displacement and collision.

Chemical motion is the qualitative changes that occur in the molecules of substances as a result of the movement of atoms .

Biological movement is those qualitative changes that arise as a result of the metabolism of the organism and the external environment (also movement).

And society has its own special form of social movement.

In short, everything that exists moves, and the measure of this movement is such a concept as energy .

Even this text is a form of material movement. The energy of the neurons of my brain not only formulates thoughts, but also sets the muscles of the body in motion, thus creating a text that you read through a similar apparatus of your body. If, as a result of assimilating the text of the letter, you commit certain actions, then it will also become a form of social movement, provided that their consequences are significant. It is unlikely that Pushkin, when he wrote "Eugene Onegin", could have imagined what "social energy" the trivial story he told would have. And in fact, it has a major influence on young people's ideas about love, even if they have never read the work itself.

Further. We began to understand existence by fixing matter, the mode of existence of which is movement. Matter moves, thus all the diversity of its forms, elements exist through birth, blossoming, withering and death with a new birth, colliding, forming more complex forms from the simple and disintegrating into the simple from the complex .

But to say that everything that exists is material and moves is not enough. We need to go deeper. What exactly does materiality mean? How exactly does materiality manifest itself?

Everything material has a characteristic that gives us scientific categories of all forms of matter. Everything material has a material character.

1 . This means that all elements and "units" of matter have mass. "Mass" is a concept that expresses the amount of matter: how much or how little matter makes up an object or process. If we observe a real phenomenon but cannot record its mass, then we are dealing with a disturbance, a wave of the material environment. In a continuous environment, motion can be transmitted from one element to another without their significant displacement, like a wave in water.

In short, everything that exists has mass and nothing else. If someone claims that something has no mass, then they are trying to deceive you.

2 . The material nature of matter also means that everything is a whole for its constituent elements and a part of something greater. Everything has some structure, internal organization and is connected to everything else in a certain way. There are no bodies or phenomena that consist of themselves, are the first cause of themselves or are not connected to anything. If someone claims such a thing, you are being deceived.

3 . Further, the material nature of matter means that everything has form and content, i.e. its structure contains elements responsible for external boundaries (form, extent) and internal boundaries (content). When we say about something "what is it?", we mean its content. When we say about something "what is it like?", we mean its form. Form is always meaningful, and content is always somehow formed. Form and content correspond to each other. If the content changes, then the form will also change, but not immediately. If external forces change the form, the content will be forced to adapt to these changes. If someone claims that something has no form or no content, then they are trying to deceive you.

All these are logical conclusions based on human experience, on active interaction with the surrounding world (production, experiments, observations) and within society itself. These are irrefutable, absolute truths.

If we dig even deeper than the material nature of matter, we will notice that the entire diversity of forms of matter, objects, processes appears in the form of qualitative and quantitative moments. In everything we can find 1) uniqueness, dissimilarity, distinctiveness from everything in general and 2) identity, similarity with this or that. The category of quality expresses the first, quantity - the second.

For example, the quality of you as a person is what distinguishes you from all people and from all things in the universe. And quantity is the connection of you into some identical groups. Let's say you are first of all a person, and there are almost 8 billion people today. You belong to the Russian culture, as do 250 million people, etc. But any quality can be broken down into a number of some constituent qualities. Let's say the quality of your personality is represented first of all by a certain number of correct and incorrect actions, good and evil done, decency and meanness. And so on. Likewise, your organism is a certain number of certain systems and apparatuses of life activity, limbs, bones, tissues, etc.

However, quality is primary , and quantity is always the similarity of some qualities . If you have ten plums on the table in front of you, then all these plums are different, but they are all plums.

The question arises, how and why do some things and processes collide and form something new, while others do not? Or, conversely, why does something, under the influence of external forces, disintegrate into simpler components ?

Quality is the certainty of things, processes . The result of this interaction depends on the interaction of different qualities.

For simplicity of logical illustration of these processes the following verbal explanation is offered: all qualities represent OPPOSITES relative to each other , and their collision, i.e. interaction (mutual reflection), is the UNITY that they constitute. If this unity during the collision links them together, then we have before us the formation of something new, more complex. If this unity during the collision does not link them, then their potentials and vectors simply change. Sometimes one destroys the other.

An example can be given not only from physics or chemistry, but also from everyday life. For example, you as an individual interact with another person. You are opposites. Your unity is manifested in interaction, in communication, but above all in common activities. Some friction occurs, "exchange of social energy", and the more of it, the wider and longer the practice, the more this clash becomes unity. As a result, either you become friends, i.e. form something new, a fellowship of two people, or someone will only somehow influence someone. Or maybe it will end in a conflict, a struggle of characters and even a fight. The same thing happens in the interaction of an individual and a group.

By the way, interaction in the universe is always a mutual reflection of things, processes, phenomena . The word "reflection" is used here because later, at higher levels of matter organization, interaction through collision plays a key role in the development of biological and social forms of matter.

Further. More questions arise: what is all matter, the entirety of the material world as a whole? Where is it located and relative to what does it change?

This is how we approach space and time.

The point is that matter does not simply exist through movement, it moves in space and changes in time. Space is, in fact, the receptacle of matter . It itself is immaterial and absolute, like time. Time is pure immaterial movement, relative to which all changes in the world occur .

If space and time are immaterial, insubstantial, how can we assert that they exist, that they constitute elements of being? Only indirectly through matter. Matter must move in something and change in motion relative to something absolute. Otherwise it is unthinkable. Moreover, space and time are infinite, that is, they have neither beginning nor end. Consequently, matter, which fills all space and exists in time, is infinite, has neither beginning nor end, and, therefore, is indestructible. The latter is clearly confirmed in practice by the law of conservation of energy. And the infinity of space and time confirms everything observed in general, if we approach it conscientiously and reasonably.

Some people say, "I can't imagine infinity." But if you think about it carefully, if you think about it hard, you'll realize that, on the contrary, it's impossible to imagine anything absolutely finite.

Here is something and now it is gone. And what is left? Emptiness? But there is no emptiness in nature, it is even unthinkable. Emptiness is imagined as an empty box or some kind of vacuum. Now there is something - a box or a vacuum, they at least have some boundaries and volume. Even mathematical "emptiness", i.e. zero, is already something. It is zero. It exists as a "mathematical reality", it has its own symbol "0", etc.

In short, the universe is infinite, space is infinite, time is infinite, and matter moving in space and existing in time is infinite. And therefore, the forms and varieties of matter are also infinite. The universe has no beginning and will have no end. All the concrete forms of matter that appear and disappear are finite .

From this, for example, follows the conclusion that there are no gods or higher powers, that somewhere in the universe there is necessarily life, including intelligent life. But the main thing: everything that will be, has already happened . But at the same time, everything that was, and everything that will be, has always happened and will happen in a unique form . Just as in the universe there are no two absolutely identical things, no two absolutely identical atoms, but all things are similar to one degree or another, identical. So all events, on the one hand, are unique, on the other - they repeat each other.

So.

Matter is infinite.

It's moving.

Moves in infinite space and changes in infinitely flowing time.

It is a thing, i.e. it has mass, form, content, is a whole and a part of something bigger.

Material forms interact as opposites and sometimes form stable unities.

These are the main characteristics of material forms and their movement in space and time.

If you learn these axioms of materialism, comprehend their deep content, then you will receive in your worldview a logical "coordinate axis" for a quick, almost intuitive primary scientific examination of any theoretical calculations. If some ideas contradict the above, then they are anti-scientific, if not, then they are possibly true.

The time will come when these foundations will be studied from the earliest years of life. In a thousand years, it will be difficult for people to imagine that in our era we somehow lived without a scientific-materialistic worldview, just as it is surprising today to realize how ignorant the medieval masses were, applauding the burning of yet another witch or yet another Giordano Bruno.

('Mega' much more...)

https://prorivists.org/serious/

Google Translator

[blindpig]

DOGE and 'billionaires' not enough to 'trigger' ya? How about a conspiracy/'philosophy' to amplify their evil? Seems like the Misdirecton Of The Month...Because it's still capitalism with capitalist relations only the façade of democracy is dismissed as inefficient. Well, our democracy ain't much to write home about but many like phony facades. And what has capitalism always been about but the more efficient accumulation of profits for the Owners?

Thomas Hartmann here provides a beginners guide to this latest hair burner. A few in depth links follow. Don't be fooled, attack capitalism directly, kill the disease not the symptoms.


The Dark Enlightenment: The Tech Oligarch Ideology Driving DOGE’s Destruction
Posted by Internationalist 360° on March 23, 2025
Thom Hartmann



The future of American democracy isn’t being dismantled by accident; it’s being systematically replaced to prepare the way for something entirely new.

A radical ideology known as the Dark Enlightenment is fueling a billionaire-led movement to gut our government, erase democratic norms, and install a technocratic elite in their place.

President Donald Trump and Elon Musk aren’t just tearing down institutions—they’re laying the groundwork for an experimental new kind of authoritarian rule.
The audacious experiment Musk has embarked on—which Trump probably doesn’t even understand—involves the fundamental transformation of America from a nation ruled by its own people into one where decisions are made by a very specific elite group of self-selected “genius” white male technocrats.

Americans are baffled by the brutal, relentless attack on the institutions of America that they’ve launched.

Why would they destroy our reputation around the world by shutting down USAID? What’s wrong with the federal government helping poor school districts or giving college students Pell Grants? Why gut billions in scientific research that’s kept America at the forefront of the world and saved literally hundreds of millions of lives?

Paul Krugman recommends a psychiatrist weigh in; Dr. Bandy X. Lee (a frequent guest on my program) points that out, noting, “How exactly this plays out is, as I have said, a spiritual question.” Three New York Times writers even had a lengthy back-and-forth on the topic, under the title: “Is Destruction the Point?”

Some speculate that Musk and Trump are both tight with Putin and they’re destroying our government at his direction, helping achieve the goal he’s had since his KGB days to destroy America from within.
Others think it’s just a way of crippling government programs like Social Security, Medicaid, and the Post Office so they can now be profitably taken over by private industry.
Democratic politicians tell us Musk and Trump are just trying to cut government spending to pay for the $4 trillion in tax cuts for billionaires that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) will be introducing in the House in the next few weeks.
They’re all wrong.

The simple answer is that these people intend to replace the 240+ year “American Experiment” with a brand new governance “experiment” of their own. One that was largely developed in computer rooms around San Francisco.

There’s an actual ideology behind all this, and it isn’t the old-fashioned Ayn Rand libertarianism that was such a rage during the Reagan era.

This hot new experimental ideology, enthusiastically embraced by Silicon Valley billionaires and their “tech bros” dismantling our government, is called the Dark Enlightenment or the neo-reactionary movement (NRx).

And it’s not entirely new; they believe they have proof that it works, which can be found way over on the other side of the planet. I’ve been there, in fact, and it does seem to be working just fine… if you don’t care about freedom.

Back in 1994 I published a book proposing that ADHD wasn’t a brain disease or disorder but, instead, a form of brain wiring that would be highly adaptive during humanity’s long hunter-gatherer period but can present a struggle for people in today’s factory-like school systems. Time Magazine did a cover story about it, including an article featuring my book, and suddenly I was in demand literally around the world.

One of the countries I visited during the book tour that ensued (the book’s available in more than a dozen languages) was Singapore. A parents’ group had reached out to my publisher and set up an opportunity for me to talk about my theory and ways schools could be reinvented to work for both “normal” and ADHD kids.

I gave the speech and laid out a series of suggestions, and during the Q&A that followed, one of the parents asked how to best convince schools to adopt some of my ideas. I suggested they should “become politically active,” a standard answer in most every other country I’d visited (and here in America). Little did I realize the significance of that phrase.

When I got back to my hotel, an internationally famous five-star tower with a beautiful atrium, my room had been torn apart. The mattress and box springs were on the floor, as were the contents of my suitcase. Every drawer was pulled open. My toiletries kit was all over the bathroom floor.

I called hotel security to report what I thought was a break-in or robbery, although I couldn’t immediately see that anything was missing. The head of security showed up in my room five minutes later with the hotel manager. They looked around the room with neither shock nor alarm.

The manager explained, with a hint (but only a hint) of apology in his voice, “The police were here,” as if that explained everything

“They did this?” I asked, as I recall.

He nodded and said, “Presumably.”

“Why?” I demanded.

Both men shrugged. The head of security asked me if I’d engaged in anything illegal while in Singapore, particularly bringing illegal drugs into the country, and I indignantly denied even the possibility. They shrugged their shoulders again and offered to send a maid up to help make put the room back together.

The next morning, I had breakfast with some of the parents I’d met the afternoon before and told them what happened. They explained, in a whisper, that I never should have mentioned “politics” in my speech.

“It is not allowed here,” as I recall one telling me.

Singapore has come a ways from the mid-1990s, but is still an authoritarian state. As Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein wrote for Mother Jones:

During his reign, [Lee Kuan Yew, aka LKY, Singapore’s former leader] successfully fused pro-corporate libertarian economics and state socialism, creating a distinctly conservative mishmash of social and political control.

Singapore has banned all kinds of free speech; intervened in marriages and family planning; encouraged eugenics; caned people for minor crimes; created an ethnically homogeneous ruling class; treated the migrant worker population as second-class citizens; and, famously, banned chewing gum.

This is LKY’s model: economic development above all else—even human rights. A “soft” authoritarianism, as Fareed Zakaria has called it. “The exuberance of democracy,” LKY explained, “leads to indiscipline and disorderly conduct, which are inimical to development.”

According to the philosopher-king of the Dark Enlightenment movement, the guy who woke up JD Vance, and the billionaires who support him, Singapore is their explicit model for America’s future.

As Kaiser-Schatzlein writes about Curtis Yarvin and the other Dark Enlightenment thinkers who have inspired Musk, Theil, Vance, et al.:

For a new breed of right-wing thinkers, politicians, and activists, LKY’s approach to government is appealing. Curtis Yarvin, Silicon Valley’s resident neo-monarchist, compares LKY to FDR—both good examples, he says, of a unilateral leader.

And Nick Land, an accelerationist philosopher, calls LKY an “autocratic enabler of freedom.”

To them, LKY is the paradigm of an illiberal ruler who created a paradise for his subjects: a freedom without rights, a prosperity without disorder.

Sure, Republicans are going to gut government spending to pay for tax cuts for the billionaires who own them. And they definitely want big Wall Street banks to run Social Security just like George W. Bush handed more than half of Medicare (so far) over to giant for-profit insurance companies. After all, both industries represent such big campaign donors.

But this goes way beyond merely making billionaires richer or giving corporations more power over our lives. The audacious experiment Musk has embarked on—which Trump probably doesn’t even understand—involves the fundamental transformation of America from a nation ruled by its own people into one where decisions are made by a very specific elite group of self-selected “genius” white male technocrats.

And once AI reaches the ability to think with the intelligence of a genius-level human—Artificial General Intelligence or AGI—some of these guys believe that most of the decision-makers and agencies of the federal government can simply be replaced by banks of computers, deciding who gets what, when, and why.

All it’ll take is a monarchical leader who, like KLY, brooks no dissent.

Trump could be that leader—or at least the useful-idiot-frontman for the technocrats like Vance and Musk who are really running things—and the gutting of federal agencies opens up a space to replace them (and their workers) with AGI-based computer systems.

Rana Foorahar explains it in The Financial Times:

The philosophy argues that democracy inherently leads to social decline, because of the development of deep state bureaucracies that are unable to control oligarchic forces, and that societies should be run like corporations, with a kind of CEO Monarch in charge.

As Yarvin has said, “If Americans want to change their government, they need to get rid of dictator phobia… One way of dealing with that is… hire two executives and make sure they work together and there is really no other solution…”

And they’re much further along in the process of both gutting government and seizing total control of our political system to implement this experiment than most Americans realize.

A new site that lays out exactly how they’re progressing toward their goal of kneecapping the federal bureaucracy is project2025.observer; according to the site, they’re about 40% of the way there, although the courts may set them back temporarily.
And the project for billionaires to take complete control of our elected officials (and thus our government, at all levels) is also nearly complete: Fully 18% of all spending on the 2024 elections was done by just 150 billionaire families who represent a mere .00000045% of the American population.
The Dark Enlightenment has little use for democracy; openly disdains notions of equality as proposed in the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution (viewing them as unnatural and counterproductive); and rejects what they call “Whig historiography,” which assumes history inevitably progresses toward greater liberty and enlightenment.

Instead, like Julius Evola, Thomas Carlyle, and Oswald Spengler, they argue that “classical” societal structures that ruled the world for millennia (like feudalism, monarchy, or cameralism) are superior to democracy and, completely ignoring the history of the development of modern democracy, should—with a high-tech AGI twist—replace today’s democratic “experiment.”

(Ironically, a large portion of the infrastructure that this movement is using was financed by fossil fuel billionaires who simply wanted to avoid paying income taxes and to have their oil companies deregulated so they could make more pollution and thus more profit. Similar to the people who funded the rise of Hitler—including Fritz Thyssen who wrote the book I Paid Hitler after WWII as an apology—many are now surprised, and some even frightened, by the turn of things.)

They are pushing forward with the “move fast and break things” slogan of the Tech industry that Mark Zuckerberg popularized. And they are having breathtaking success, between that strategy and the billions of dollars they are easily able to spend to seize the political power to fulfill their vision. They call themselves “Masters of the Universe” without a trace of irony.

Some high-profile observers of American politics are alert to this takeover-in-progress that most of our media has completely missed. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, for example, recently wrote for his Substack newsletter:

Behind Vance and Musk is a libertarian community of rich crypto bros, tech executives, back-to-the-landers, and disaffected far-right intellectuals.

Curtis Yarvin comes as close as anyone as being their intellectual godfather. He has written that political power in the United States is held by a liberal amalgam of universities and the mainstream media whose commitment to equality and justice is eroding America’s social order.

In Yarvin’s view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful. They should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose major “shareholders” select an executive with total power, who serves at their pleasure.

Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime.

He notes that these tech-bro “oligarchs of the techno-state” want to replace “inefficient” democracy with “an authoritarian regime replete with technologies they control.”

Rachel Maddow has similarly featured stories about Yarvin and others like him on her program, albeit infrequently. The New Yorker has written about the movement, as have multiple other publications.

Lefty intellectuals and progressive thought leaders are suddenly waking up to the Dark Enlightenment experiment that, like a glacier finally reaching the sea, has been slowly consuming the GOP as it moves along and is now—with hundreds of millions from Elon Musk buying the White House for Trump—suddenly cleaving off massive icebergs of damaged governmental institutions.

But a much wider understanding of what’s really animating Trump’s and Musk’s experimental destruction of our government is needed.

If Americans don’t wake up to the Dark Enlightenment’s creeping grip on the people who control our democracy, we may soon find ourselves living in a country where elections are meaningless, the government serves only the ultra-rich, and freedom exists in name only.

Pass it along… and get into the streets!

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2025/03/ ... struction/

Thomas Hartmann demands that we defend our illusions when we already live in the country described in that last paragraph.

DE in depth:

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2025/03/ ... te-part-i/

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2025/03/ ... e-part-ii/

[blindpig]

Hegel reading Heraclitus by Stephen Lahey 2021

Hegel reading Heraclitus
Originally published: Philosophy Now on 2025 by Antonis Chaliakopoulos (more by Philosophy Now) (Posted Apr 15, 2025)

When Euripides asked Socrates his opinion on the book On Nature by Heraclitus of Ephesus (c.535-475 BC), Socrates answered that the part he understood was excellent, as was the part he did not.

These are the two faces of Heraclitus. On the one side is the obscure philosopher, the ‘Dark Riddler’ whom even Socrates had trouble comprehending. On the other side is the profundity of a work worth exploring, a work that is rewarding in its depth. This duality is expressed in the lyrics of the ancient tragical poet Scythinus:

Do not be in too great a hurry to get to the end of Heraclitus the Ephesian’s book: the path is hard to travel.
Gloom is there and darkness devoid of light.
But if an initiate be your guide, the path shines brighter than sunlight.
(Diogenes Laertius IX, 16)

Hard and rewarding is Heraclitus, but also mystical, since an initiation into his work by an acolyte is required. In this regard, G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) is similar: an undoubtedly difficult, often inaccessible philosopher, whose secrets can best be revealed through a proper introduction.

Hegel himself also felt the attraction of Heraclitus. That is made explicit in Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy (1830), where he notes: “Here we see land; there is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my Logic” (trans. E.S Haldane, p.278). However, Hegel’s reading of Heraclitus in his Lectures is not that of a historian studying a historic persona; it is a tribute to a spiritual predecessor to whom the foundations of his own philosophy can be traced.

One problem with this spiritual descent is that it entails a lot of anachronistic speculation. It is very doubtful that Heraclitus really meant things the way Hegel interpreted them. Moreover, the work of the Ephesian today survives only in fragments retrieved from the works of Greek, Roman, and Christian authors who also often distorted the meaning of the original. Hegel doesn’t really tackle this issue at all, and often takes the fragments out of their original context, offering at best ambiguous interpretations.

Yet despite the issues of how he interpreted the fragments, Hegel’s lecture on Heraclitus conceives the spirit of the Greek philosopher in a unique manner. Behind the multiple layers of Hegel’s ideas, the Heraclitean logos (λόγος) or ‘divine principle of reason’ still shines brightly. Furthermore, Hegel was one of the few, if not the first, Western philosopher in centuries to properly understand the Heraclitean principles of constant flux and the unity of opposites, which ideas also form the basis for Hegel’s dialectic. This means that Hegel’s lecture on Heraclitus is a good introduction to the Greek’s most complex concepts, and an even better introduction into Hegel’s own philosophy. This is akin to the way Homer’s epics are more useful in understanding Homer’s own time than understanding the later Greek Bronze Age they were read in, in which they were already regarded as ‘classics’.

Heraclitus According to Hegel
‘Dialectic’ means an interpretive process incorporating contradictory ideas to reach a conclusion. Let’s look first at dialectic as Heraclitus uses it.

The dialectical method is comprised of three moments. In the first, the ‘moment of understanding’, one idea (for example, Being) is firmly defined. In the second moment, called ‘the dialectical’, we pass on to the completely opposite idea (Non-Being). The third moment is the ‘speculative’, and it leads to a understanding of the unity of the two previous ideas, which are now reconciled (in this case, in Becoming).

Heraclitus’s dialectic is a positive one: it does not aim at proving what does not exist (like the Eleatics), or that all opinions are relative (like the Sophists). Instead it searches for what exists, what is true. Hegel credits Heraclitus with conceiving the developed dialectic form. According to Hegel, Heraclitus was the first to formulate that the ‘Absolute’—the all-inclusive whole or unity that underlies everything—exists in the unity of opposites, first as a ‘Being’, and secondly as a constant ‘Becoming’. The main philosophical adversary of Heraclitus was Parmenides. Against Parmenides’ aphorism that ‘‘the one… is, and it is not possible for it not to be’’, Heraclitus believed that everything is in flux—that everything is Becoming—and so in a certain sense what is, at the same time, isn’t.

For Hegel, with Heraclitus, philosophy reaches the high plateau of ‘speculative form’—a kind of thinking that is able to explain everything without gaps. For him, previous thinkers, such as Parmenides and Zeno dwelt with an ‘abstract understanding’ of, presumably, lower value. Additionally, Hegel thinks that Heraclitus is unjustly called obscure. Given that complex language is needed to describe complex ideas, Heraclitus is instead a master of complex concepts. Those unable to fully grasp them confuse complexity with obscurity in order to justify their own failure in understanding. Here, Hegel again invokes Socrates’ saying that ‘it would take a Delian diver’ to get to the bottom of Heraclitus; the process reminds him of fishing for pearls.

The Logical Principle
For Heraclitus, two opposing things unite in one to create harmony, and everything that exists is constituted through the struggle of its opposing parts. This is expressed in multiple fragments of his writing, such as the following:

Men do not know how what is at variance agrees with itself. It is an attunement of opposite tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre
(B51, trans. T.M. Robinson, 1987).

Another formulation of this principle is found in his statement that honey tastes sweet to the healthy and bitter to the sick. In this case, honey is one thing with two opposite qualities, just like seawater is both death for humans and life for fish: “The sea is the purest and the impurest water. Fish can drink it, and it is good for them; to men it is undrinkable and destructive” (B61).

Interpreting these fragments, Hegel deducts that “the truth only is as the unity of distinct opposites and… of the pure opposition of being and non-being… Being is and yet is not” (Lectures p.282). This is the primary Hegelian logical principle (his version of the logos): the unity of Being and Non-Being which together constitute ‘the Absolute’. Furthermore, in Hegel’s Science of Logic (1816), after a first examination, pure Being and pure Non-Being are found to be notions void of meaning if viewed independent of each other (§132-134). Instead, it is only in terms of the transition from a state of nothingness to a state of existence that they can both be properly defined and understood. This movement from one state to another is Becoming. This is the only constant, and it is becoming which logically synthesizes nothingness and existence.

The principle of constant movement, of Becoming, is also key in understanding Heraclitus. Plato encapsulates it perfectly in his dialogue Cratylus (402a): “Heraclitus says, you know, that all things move, and nothing remains still and he likens the universe to the current of a river, saying that you cannot step twice into the same stream.” But the most famous examples, by far, are Heraclitus’ own river aphorisms:

You cannot step twice into the same river; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you. (B12)

We step and do not step into the same river; we are and are not. (B49a)

The world is in flux, nothing remains the same, everything is changing, everything is becoming: Panta rhei—‘Everything flows’—is the philosophy of Heraclitus concentrated in two words. This constant movement of Being requires the activity of Being dividing itself into opposites that are both distinct entities and parts of Being.

In his lecture on Heraclitus, Hegel takes these ideas a step further to explain identity. Subjectivity is the opposite of objectivity, and since “each is the ‘other’ of the ‘other’ as its ‘other’, we here have their identity.” The point is that without the ‘other’ and its implications there is no subject, since the subject can only be defined by something other than itself. So the identity of a thing is the result of a dialectical process. This is exactly why in the Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807, Φ 178) Hegel writes that self-consciousness exists only by being recognized by another self-consciousness. But this illustrates well how for both Heraclitus and Hegel the universe is not definite and stable but moving and changing. Being is a process—that of Becoming.

Time & Fire
The German goes on to interpret two more basic Heraclitean concepts: time and fire.

Time for Heraclitus is the very embodiment of Becoming, and its first form. It is pure Becoming, and the harmony of the opposing Being and Non-Being. Hegel opines that “in time there is no past and future, but only the now, and this is, but is not as regards the past; and this non-being, as future, turns round into Being” (Lectures, p.287).

For Heraclitus, fire is the elementary principle out of which everything is created and to which everything returns. It can take the shape of everything and everything can take the shape of fire, in a process of continuous creation and destruction. Hegel argues that Heraclitus didn’t really believe that everything is made from fire in the way that Thales thought that everything came from water; rather, he chose fire as a metaphor of a force that constantly shifts its form. Fire never stays still and is always in unrest. Unlike earth, air, or water, which often appear static, fire is itself a process. In these senses, fire can be viewed as representing the idea of Becoming in terms of the natural process of material transformation—as opposed to time, which is the abstract representation of the process.

The natural processes represented by fire destroy and create matter. These are two distinct paths; indeed, in Heraclitus we encounter a ‘way downwards’ (ὁδός κάτω), where fire becomes moisture, which then becomes water, which then condenses to become earth; and a ‘way upwards’ (ὁδός ἄνω), where earth becomes water, then water gives form to everything else. Like everything else, this is a process that never ceases. Hegel says that the way upwards is the process of differentiation and creation that leads to Being; and the way downwards is the process of destruction, leading to Non-Being. “Nature is thus a circle” concludes Hegel.


Heraclitus portrait © Clinton van Inman 2021 Facebook at Clinton.inman

Consciousness & Truth
Expressing his admiration for Heraclitus’s ability to explain the dialectic using simple analogies drawn from daily life, Hegel says that he has “a beautiful, natural, child-like manner of speaking truth of the truth” (p.293). There’s something deeply entertaining in reading one of the most incomprehensible philosophers of all time claiming that Heraclitus, a.k.a. ‘the Obscure One’, has a ‘child-like manner’ of speaking the truth. Hegel also sees in Heraclitus the origins of other concepts central to his system of thought, such as the unity of object and subject, the omnipresent nature of the Absolute Spirit (Geist), and the unity of experience. These ideas are thoroughly explored in the third section of his lecture, which answers the questions: ‘How does logos come to consciousness?’ and ‘How is it related to the individual soul?’ Hegel believes that the Greek rejected sensuous reality as the area where one can find the truth. If for Heraclitus everything that is also is not, that means that all we observe as real is also not real. Following this path, Hegel concludes that “not this immediate Being, but absolute mediation, Being as thought of, Thought itself, is the true Being” (p.294). In other words, it is not through observation, but only through reason, that one can discern the truth.

Hegel gives another interesting interpretation to some Heraclitean fragments about sleep, learning, and reality:

All the things we see when awake are death, even as all we see in slumber are sleep. (B21)

Eyes and ears are bad witnesses to men who have barbarian souls. (B107)

The learning of many things teacheth not understanding, else would it have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, and again Xenophanes and Hekataios. (B40)

Hegel interprets these fragments to show a distinction between particular and universal reason—between the thought of the individual (or subjective consciousness) and the Idea (objective or Absolute consciousness) or as Heraclitus names it, the logos. ‘Consciousness’ here refers to cognitive awareness, and it is often used interchangeably by Hegel to denote both the subject’s consciousness of an object, and also the subject’s self-awareness. According to Hegel, Heraclitus first established the unity of the subjective and objective consciousness—a key Hegelian idea—when he implied that the waking man is related to things universally. Sextus Empiricus expresses some relevant ideas on this issue in Adversos Mathematicos, VII.127-133. Here he relates that for Heraclitus, sleep is a state where our senses, our anchors to the world, stop functioning. The subject stops communicating with the logos, the objective consciousness, and this isolation makes what we experience in our sleep a dream. The only connection with the world in this sleeping state is our breath, which is likened to a root keeping us attached to reality. In contrast, when we are awake, we establish a fragmented but real conscious relationship with reality and the logos. If Sextus correctly understands Heraclitus, Heraclitus is also rejecting those who claim to have received wisdom from God in their sleep.

In another fragment, Heraclitus seems to advocate that we can reach objective knowledge of the logos. This may appear to go against his doctrine of constant flux, which implies that empirical knowledge is meaningless since things change all the time. However, here Heraclitus advocates using changing empirical observations to come to an unchanging knowledge of reality:

Though this Word [Logos] is true evermore, yet men are as unable to understand it when they hear it for the first time as before they have heard it at all. For, though all things come to pass in accordance with this Word, men seem as if they had no experience of them, when they make trial of words and deeds such as I set forth, dividing each thing according to its kind and showing how it truly is. But other men know not what they are doing when awake, even as they forget what they do in sleep. (B1)

Commenting on this fragment, which is thought to be the introduction to Heraclitus’s book, Hegel says (pp.296-97):

Great and important words! We cannot speak of truth in a truer or less prejudiced way. Consciousness as consciousness of the universal, is alone consciousness of truth; but consciousness of individuality and action as individual, an originality which becomes a singularity of content or of form, is the untrue and bad. Wickedness and error thus are constituted by isolating thought and thereby bringing about a separation from the universal. Men usually consider, when they speak of thinking something, that it must be something particular, but this is quite a delusion.

Hegel concludes his lecture on Heraclitus with a modification of the words of Socrates he used for his introduction:

What remains to us of Heraclitus is excellent, and we must conjecture of what is lost, that it was as excellent. Or if we wish to consider fate so just as always to preserve to posterity what is best, we must at least say of what we have of Heraclitus, that it is worthy of this preservation..

https://mronline.org/2025/04/15/hegel-r ... eraclitus/

[blindpig]

Heidegger’s feeble excuses
Originally published: Philosophy Now on Issue 18 by John Mann (more by Philosophy Now) (Posted Apr 21, 2025)

Martin Heidegger was arguably the most important philosopher of the twentieth century. According to this book he was also a devout Nazi who never recanted his evil political beliefs.

During the Second World War Martin Heidegger lived and worked in Germany. There are a number of sympathetic accounts of how he spent his time:

1
The “He Quietly Worked Away at Philosophy” Theory

According to this theory Heidegger ignored the outside world, and continued to do his philosophy, working on ancient Greek thinkers, Holderlin, Nietzsche and so on, until the war was over and he was able to—well, carry on ignoring the outside world and continue with his philosophy!

One little problem with this theory is the fact Heidegger was appointed Rector of the University of Freiberg from 22 April 1933 until he resigned on 23 April 1934; this was a major position in Nazi Germany, and so he cannot have been totally lost to the outside world.

2
The “He Tried to Do Good as a Rector” Theory

According to this theory Heidegger had the Rectorship pushed upon him, and thought he could do some good opposing the Nazis. When he realised he could do no good, he went back to philosophy (see Theory 1, above).

Ott shows there are enough falsehoods in this sentence to write a book about (the one under review). Firstly, Heidegger joined the Nazi group at Freiberg and was their candidate for the post of Rector—he was the official Nazi choice. Secondly, he certainly didn’t oppose the Nazis once he took the post—he pushed the Nazi cause and hastened the process of Gleichschaltung, the Nazi reorganisation of the universities. One of his most obvious achievements was the imposition of the ‘Sieg Heil’ Nazi salute within the University. Finally, the reason he resigned from the post is due to a power struggle within the Nazi party which Heidegger lost.

3
The “Heidegger’s Nazism wasn’t real Nazism” Theory

According to this theory Heidegger was a bit out of touch with the real world, and completely mistook Nazism for quite a nice political theory. He might have gone about with a little Nazi lapel badge and given the Hitler salute, but in his head he was not really a Nazi.

It certainly appears to be true that Heidegger thought only he could explain the meaning of Adolf Hitler, and aspired to be the Nazis’ leading intellectual. He saw the coming of Hitler as the advent of Being itself. In his Rectorship address he says “let not your being be ruled by doctrine or ‘ideas’. The Führer himself and he alone is the German reality, present and future, and its law.”

Yet Heidegger wasn’t simply concerned with using his Rector’s position to achieve intellectual power. He paid close attention to everyday matters, such as attending Nazi student ‘military’ exercises, and at the Rectorship inauguration ceremony ensuring the Nazi anthem, the Horst-Wessel Lied, be printed on the back of the programme.

4
The “But He Always Acted Honourably” Theory

According to this theory, Heidegger might have innocently been led astray by Nazism, but he was still basically a good person—if rather naive.

Heidegger cannot be called a ‘good person’ even before his Nazi period. He typically took from anyone offering, and never gave anything in return. Edmund Husserl is a good example of this—Heidegger played the ‘good pupil’ while Husserl did all he could to get Heidegger the chair at Marburg, but after obtaining the position Heidegger turned his back on Husserl, closed all personal ties and almost immediately began attacking his work.

In Nazi Germany Heidegger happily denounced those he did not like to the authorities—the case of Hermann Staudinger, who Heidegger denounced to the Gestapo is a good example. He tried to block Eduard Baumgarten’s academic career by claiming he was a friend of Jews (“he established close contact with the Jew Fraenkel, who used to teach in Gottingen and has now been dismissed from there”). Other examples are where Heidegger blocks academically able students if they have a negative attitude to the Nazi state (e.g. he does this with Max Muller in 1938/ 39).

5
The “He Was Only a Nazi For a Short Time” Theory

This theory admits that Heidegger was a Nazi for a short time—in the early 1930s—but that he soon realised its true nature and quickly escaped from it.

As can be seen from the report he sends to the Freiberg office of the League of University Lecturers on Max Muller’s negative attitude to the National Socialist state in 1938/39, Heidegger’s ties to Nazism last a lot longer than his defenders would like to admit.

In 1935 Heidegger is still writing about the “inward truth and greatness of National Socialism”, and even as late as 1942 he writes against academics who do “no service to National Socialism and its unique historical status—not that it stands in need of such favours”. Clearly Heidegger was a supporter of Nazism even into the 1940s. After the war it is well known that he was reluctant to speak of his time in Germany under the Nazis, and certainly he never spoke openly against Nazism.

What does it mean if one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century was a Nazi? Does it someone disprove or invalidate Heidegger’s philosophy? Does it somehow invalidate philosophy in general?

There are no simple answers to questions like these. Certainly many people, including the present writer, have found Heidegger’s writings profound and thoughtful. How can someone who has inspired writers, theologians and artists as well as other philosophers, be simply ‘wrong’? The solution, if there is one, lies in the recognition that Heidegger’s experience is not an exception—we know clever people are not always good people, even that sensitive, artistic people are not always good people. The lesson of Heidegger and those like him is that what one creates may be totally unrelated to what we are. Don Cupitt in his book Solar Ethics makes a similar point.

I am not claiming… that by writing Die Einterreise Franz Schubert procures either therapy or even relief for his psychic distress and his grief… but if he loved music more even than himself, if he longed to express himself musically, and if he poured his heart out into his music… the artwork becomes his objective redemption by what it does for us, rather than for him.

Reading Heidegger after reading this book is difficult, but Cupitt shows that no matter how mean and wretched the individual spirit, what it creates may yet shine. Heidegger’s soul was black, but his books may still give out light.

https://mronline.org/2025/04/21/heidegg ... e-excuses/

No excuse for Nazism, none.

[blindpig]

Conversations about important things

Before we start our conversation with WHAT WE ARE - and this is the natural beginning of any worldview - it is imperative to understand what the surrounding world is.

The thing is that humans, by universal standards, have not appeared that long ago. Not that long ago even by the standards of our planet's existence. The world existed, spun, twirled and seethed before humans gradually populated the planet.

Therefore, before thinking about who you are, why you are here and who needs you, what your meaning and purpose are, it would be good to understand the meaning of being itself (being is everything that is).

*
What is the world we live in?

It is easy to see that the universe, the stars, the cosmic and natural processes on our planet are deeply indifferent to the fate of humanity and the lives of individuals. There is no meaningfulness in the universe itself, its existence proceeds absolutely objectively ( = regardless of consciousness, any! ), through the collision of various forces, opposing principles.

The simplest and most visual description of the external world is mechanical interaction: everything moves somewhere, collides, collapses, merges, energy is transferred from one body to another, complex bodies are formed from simple ones ( complex means composed of simple ones), complex ones disintegrate , etc., etc. And everything consists of each other, like a nesting doll.

Organisms disintegrate into various systems and life apparatuses, which disintegrate into complex substances, complex substances into simple substances, simple substances into molecules and atoms, molecules and atoms into lighter and simpler atoms, and these, in turn, into even smaller elements, and so on ad infinitum.

That is, everything complex and large is a certain organization of something simpler and smaller. .

Moreover, each level of organization has its own specifics, its own laws and patterns, its own logic of things and processes.

Science currently identifies several levels of such organization.

1. Physical . It all starts with the microworld. This is a sphere of global scale. Space is an endless sea of ​​extremely fine gaseous matter filling all space, called ether. Streams of ether move in a spiral to the centers of galaxies. There they collide at great speed, and thus streams of protons, neutrons and radiation from the centers of galaxies to their outskirts are formed.

The movement of ether to the center of galaxies and from the center of galaxies in the form of protons, neutrons and radiation gives rise to all known phenomena of the microworld from gravity, light, electromagnetic radiation to the processes of formation of stars, planets and other cosmic bodies.

These are monstrously gigantic scales with huge time intervals. It takes billions of years for a galaxy to form.

The speed at which the ether moves is not yet known for certain, but protons and radiation from the center of the galaxy move at the speed of light. This is very fast for us and very slow relative to the distances of the galaxies themselves.

We see light at a distance of 14 billion light years. This means that the photons have been flying to us for 14 billion years. During this time, they are gradually destroyed by friction with the surrounding ether and the influence of other external forces.

The center of our galaxy, which is far from the largest, is almost 30 thousand light years away (that is, we now see the center of the Milky Way as it was at the time when people were just domesticating dogs).

It is clear that the speed of movement of protons, neutrons and radiations, from which stars, planets and all bodies are formed, is quite low compared to the scale of space. Therefore, transformation and changes in space occur very, very, very slowly. Although we on Earth are excited by the thought that light, heat and other rays from the Sun reach us in just eight minutes.

2. Chemical . This is a much more complex level of organization, when we are talking about substances, that is, about the combination of complex, large atoms and molecules. In space, there are very few substances as such, if we do not count stars and planets. Substances are formed on celestial bodies.

3. Biological . This is a super-complex level of organization, when organisms are born from the most complex organic substances, through their intricate interweaving, i.e. life appears. The essence of life is that living organisms exist through the exchange of substances with their environment.

4. Social . This humanity is a particularly complex form of life. That is why we thought about the meaning of existence.

For each more complex level of organization, the previous ones represent, firstly, the building material of which it consists, and secondly, the environment (conditions) of existence or habitation .

Thus,

1) for us, people in general, the plant and animal world is what we consist of and what we live in the environment of;

2) for us, humans as biological organisms, substances and their compounds are what we are made of and how and where we exist;

3) for us, people as a certain set of chemical apparatuses of life activity, the physical world and cosmic processes are what forms us, and the environment in which we exist.

It's all pretty simple to understand and extremely difficult to grasp. But it makes sense, right?

What has been said is not an opinion, not some model that approximately explains the observed, not a hypothesis or a guess, but a scientific conclusion from the entirety of social practice. From those thousands of years of human history that have given billions of facts, observations, experiments. First of all, from the practice of the reproduction of humanity itself, that is, the process of life and death, production and consumption of material and spiritual goods.

What distinguishes scientific knowledge from everything else is its adequacy. , i.e. strict correspondence to objective reality. All this is verified by the very practice of humanity, production, discoveries, research, etc.

Note that scientific knowledge is the exact opposite of NOT ignorance, as it may seem, because scientific knowledge fully assumes that we may not yet know something. Scientific knowledge is the opposite of faith . If you believe in something, it definitely means only one thing - that you do not know (therefore believing is stupid).

It is impossible to believe in knowledge, because knowledge is confirmed in practice, therefore, there is no room for faith. If we do not know something yet, then we can assume, build hypotheses and guesses on the basis of the knowledge we already have. They must be completely scientific and also not connected with faith. Where there is faith, there can be no science. This is the most important axiom of knowledge.

I. The foundations of the universe
So, if we take a fresh look at the entire Matryoshka-like universe, in which the simple is combined into the complex, and the complex exists in the simple, we can discover several important conclusions, laws that are equally significant for all spheres of knowledge, for everything in general. They constitute the fundamental basis of a scientific, i.e. adequate, worldview and methodology of thinking.

People who think and live with mush in their heads instead of a worldview, do not see anything further than their noses. They reason exclusively within the framework of the ordinary, within the framework of everyday practice. They are afraid of the universal, they are afraid of methodology and any fundamental knowledge. Usually they try to explain everything beyond their immediate everyday experience mystically, relying on various mystical ideologies, for example, religion. Religion gives an anti-scientific, unreasonable, faith-based, i.e. illogical, explanation of the essence of the world. But the bourgeoisie and ordinary people usually do not even know the theoretical foundations of religion. They live with petty everyday questions, superstitions, signs and prayers are enough for them.

Most people turn into such people at your age, so you need to educate yourself, think and think, work with your head, work on yourself, study, study, study. There are social reasons for turning into a philistine, it is beneficial to certain social forces, because the dumber people are, the narrower their worldview, the easier it is to exploit, oppress and deceive them.

They say that the sleep of reason produces monsters. Total ignorance, especially in matters of social science, produces not only monsters like mass murderers, terrorists, sadists and psychopaths, but also a swamp of indifferent philistines.

Most of these people have a short memory for social events, because they perceive all information only in direct relation to the vector of their life. These people say: "Why do I need to know this?", "Physics will not be useful to me in life", "What benefit can I get from this?" etc. Their natural curiosity, which underlies a healthy need for knowledge, is dulled to the level of passive curiosity. Such people have enough rumors, gossip, memes, jokes, secrets, especially if it follows from them that other people are doing even worse and they are even bigger clowns and idiots. This is not only meaningless, but also morbid curiosity. However, in each one, one way or another, there is curiosity and inquisitiveness. The problem is in the balance and dynamics of this balance.

There is nothing sadder than living a life full of emotions from curiosity, fashion, shopaholism, comfort and idleness. It is not only boring, pathetic and mentally unhealthy, but also undermines the very high title of man. Such a life is little like a human one. In general, theoretical activity is the most important form of human practice in general. If you want to be a real person, do not neglect scientific and theoretical activity, at least to fill your consciousness with adequate knowledge. And all these boring depressions and sick perversions are the usual swinishness of the philistine.

But it is important to understand the criticism of the philistine not in the form of contempt and hatred for others, for this is a superficial judgment in the style of the philistine. Curiosity differs from inquisitiveness primarily not in its subject, but in that the latter seeks to penetrate to the cause. As stated above, philistinism and ignorance have social roots, i.e. there are social forces that benefit from this, therefore they form the corresponding conditions, education, etc. Why in the information space around you there is 1% scientific knowledge and 99% garbage in the form of propaganda of egoism, exploitation of base instincts, mysticism and other nonsense? Moreover, the production of everything - from books, television and the Internet to the content of lessons and social events - is paid for by someone. Even if you buy it yourself, it was produced in advance with the purpose of forming a market and the illusion of choice. So think about it. And sooner or later you realize that mass ignorance is an integral element of society in the system of private property relations. And philistinism is just another form of ignorance. Without fools there can be no slavery, feudalism and capitalism. Therefore, the production of stupidity and fools is an important element in maintaining the economic and political system.

And this, by the way, is favored by the very structure of consciousness. The fact is that thinking arose as an objective necessity of adaptation of mankind to the environment. Thinking was initially active and was aimed at daily solution of specific problems of survival of an individual organism and a community of people. Consequently, with the development of society, division of labor, growth of technologies, change of life, etc., the daily need to think with the head ceased to be so urgent. Today, in order to “live normally” in an averagely developed country, it is possible to practically not think with the head at all. Because of this, firstly, the potential of thinking degrades, secondly, it is much more difficult for an individual to force himself to think. That is why it is necessary to constantly study, constantly think with the head and study theory.

So, how to approach the fundamental foundations of existence?

We should start with a simple reasoning.

We see a huge variety of phenomena and processes of space, nature, substances, animals (we will not include society here for now, since we are talking about the world around us, and not about us). All of them constitute the diversity of being. Therefore, they must have something in common at their core . All of them, to a single one, must be identical in what allows them to constitute the unity of being .

So what is the unity of the world? Why is everything that exists, in this world and makes up this world?

This is a philosophical question, and the answer to it cannot be found by cutting up frogs, excavating, or traveling into outer space. It is derived logically, i.e., on the one hand, on the basis of a strict generalization of all the facts, on the other - the utmost conscientious adherence to the very laws of thinking: so that there are no foreign admixtures of ideas, one is derived from another, nothing contradicts each other. In general, scientific thinking is conscientious thinking, which excludes any faith, mysticism, stretching, emotions, passions, careerism and, most importantly, interests. A scientist has one need - to find out the truth .

Thus, the unity of the world consists in its materiality . The identity of all that exists consists in its materiality. Everything real, existing, having existed and will exist is material.

"Matter" is a word whose meaning is that something was, is, or will be in reality. Everything that exists is one or another form of matter of one or another level of organization.

Further, we cannot simply be satisfied with the fact that matter exists . We must understand how exactly it exists.

The fact is that material objects and processes constantly arise and disappear , everything that exists has its beginning, its blossoming, its decay and its end. Existence is not only appearance, birth, but also disappearance. Life is replaced by death, and death by life. Life, some grimly joke, is only dying.

There is some movement in this. in this , at least from the beginning to the end of each particular thing, which becomes the starting point for the birth of something new.

Further, material objects and processes do not exist in isolation. As we have found out, the unity of the world consists in its materiality and therefore unity is manifested in everything material. What is unity? It is the combination of the different , the opposite. All material objects are different from each other (there is nothing absolutely identical in the world!), but their identity consists at least in the fact that they are material objects. This means that they interact with each other (after all, we are talking about the CONNECTION of the different). Moreover, their interaction, mutual influence on each other, is the main factor in their movement from birth to disappearance and the birth of something new.

All material objects and processes can be considered as the mechanics of being, i.e. in everything real we will see movement, collision (interaction), influence on each other, connection and disintegration . Everything that exists can at least be considered from the point of view of mechanics.

From what has been said it follows that movement is the mode of existence of matter . Matter is always moving, rest is only relative. There is no absolute rest and there cannot be. Movement is the process of existence of matter, material forms and formations. Even your consciousness is a constant movement of thought, you cannot stop thinking for a second. Even when you sleep, your brain carries out thought work outside of awareness.

Moreover, each new level of organization of matter gives its own specific type of movement, in addition to simple displacement and collision.

Chemical motion is the qualitative changes that occur in the molecules of substances as a result of the movement of atoms .

Biological movement is those qualitative changes that arise as a result of the metabolism of the organism and the external environment (also movement).

And society has its own special form of social movement.

In short, everything that exists moves, and the measure of this movement is such a concept as energy .

Even this text is a form of material movement. The energy of the neurons of my brain not only formulates thoughts, but also sets the muscles of the body in motion, thus creating a text that you read through a similar apparatus of your body. If, as a result of assimilating the text of the letter, you commit certain actions, then it will also become a form of social movement, provided that their consequences are significant. It is unlikely that Pushkin, when he wrote "Eugene Onegin", could have imagined what "social energy" the trivial story he told would have. And in fact, it has a major influence on young people's ideas about love, even if they have never read the work itself.

Next. We began to understand existence by fixing matter, the mode of existence of which is movement. Matter moves, thus all the diversity of its forms, elements exist through birth, blossoming, withering and death with a new birth, colliding, forming more complex forms from the simple and disintegrating into the simple from the complex .

But to say that everything that exists is material and moves is not enough. We need to go deeper. What exactly does materiality mean? How exactly does materiality manifest itself?

Everything material has a characteristic that gives us scientific categories of all forms of matter. Everything material has a material character.

1 . This means that all elements and "units" of matter have mass. "Mass" is a concept that expresses the amount of matter: how much or how little matter makes up an object or process. If we observe a real phenomenon but cannot record its mass, then we are dealing with a disturbance, a wave of the material environment. In a continuous environment, motion can be transmitted from one element to another without their significant displacement, like a wave in water.

In short, everything that exists has mass and nothing else. If someone claims that something has no mass, then they are trying to deceive you.

2 . The material nature of matter also means that everything is a whole for its constituent elements and a part of something greater. Everything has some structure, internal organization and is connected to everything else in a certain way. There are no bodies or phenomena that consist of themselves, are the first cause of themselves or are not connected to anything. If someone claims such a thing, you are being deceived.

3 . Further, the material nature of matter means that everything has form and content, i.e. its structure contains elements responsible for external boundaries (form, extent) and internal boundaries (content). When we say about something "what is it?", we mean its content. When we say about something "what is it like?", we mean its form. Form is always meaningful, and content is always somehow formed. Form and content correspond to each other. If the content changes, then the form will also change, but not immediately. If external forces change the form, the content will be forced to adapt to these changes. If someone claims that something has no form or no content, then they are trying to deceive you.

All these are logical conclusions based on human experience, on active interaction with the surrounding world (production, experiments, observations) and within society itself. These are irrefutable, absolute truths.

If we dig even deeper than the material nature of matter, we will notice that the entire diversity of forms of matter, objects, processes appears in the form of qualitative and quantitative moments. In everything we can find 1) uniqueness, dissimilarity, distinctiveness from everything in general and 2) identity, similarity with this or that. The category of quality expresses the first, quantity - the second.

For example, the quality of you as a person is what distinguishes you from all people and from all things in the universe. And quantity is the connection of you into some identical groups. Let's say you are first of all a person, and there are almost 8 billion people today. You belong to the Russian culture, as do 250 million people, etc. But any quality can be broken down into a number of some constituent qualities. Let's say the quality of your personality is represented first of all by a certain number of correct and incorrect actions, good and evil done, decency and meanness. And so on. Likewise, your organism is a certain number of certain systems and apparatuses of life activity, limbs, bones, tissues, etc.

However, quality is primary , and quantity is always the similarity of some qualities . If you have ten plums on the table in front of you, then all these plums are different, but they are all plums.

The question arises, how and why do some things and processes collide and form something new, while others do not? Or, conversely, why does something, under the influence of external forces, disintegrate into simpler components ?

Quality is the certainty of things, processes . The result of this interaction depends on the interaction of different qualities.

For simplicity of logical illustration of these processes the following verbal explanation is offered: all qualities represent OPPOSITES relative to each other , and their collision, i.e. interaction (mutual reflection), is the UNITY that they constitute. If this unity during the collision links them together, then we have before us the formation of something new, more complex. If this unity during the collision does not link them, then their potentials and vectors simply change. Sometimes one destroys the other.

An example can be given not only from physics or chemistry, but also from everyday life. For example, you as an individual interact with another person. You are opposites. Your unity is manifested in interaction, in communication, but above all in common activities. Some friction occurs, "exchange of social energy", and the more of it, the wider and longer the practice, the more this clash becomes unity. As a result, either you become friends, i.e. form something new, a fellowship of two people, or someone will only somehow influence someone. Or maybe it will end in a conflict, a struggle of characters and even a fight. The same thing happens in the interaction of an individual and a group.

By the way, interaction in the universe is always a mutual reflection of things, processes, phenomena . The word "reflection" is used here because later, at higher levels of matter organization, interaction through collision plays a key role in the development of biological and social forms of matter.

Further. More questions arise: what is all matter, the entirety of the material world as a whole? Where is it located and relative to what does it change?

This is how we approach space and time.

The point is that matter does not simply exist through movement, it moves in space and changes in time. Space is, in fact, the receptacle of matter . It itself is immaterial and absolute, like time. Time is pure immaterial movement, relative to which all changes in the world occur .

If space and time are immaterial, insubstantial, how can we assert that they exist, that they constitute elements of being? Only indirectly through matter. Matter must move in something and change in motion relative to something absolute. Otherwise it is unthinkable. Moreover, space and time are infinite, that is, they have neither beginning nor end. Consequently, matter, which fills all space and exists in time, is infinite, has neither beginning nor end, and, therefore, is indestructible. The latter is clearly confirmed in practice by the law of conservation of energy. And the infinity of space and time confirms everything observed in general, if we approach it conscientiously and reasonably.

Some people say, "I can't imagine infinity." But if you think about it carefully, if you think about it hard, you'll realize that, on the contrary, it's impossible to imagine anything absolutely finite.

Here is something and now it is gone. And what is left? Emptiness? But there is no emptiness in nature, it is even unthinkable. Emptiness is imagined as an empty box or some kind of vacuum. Now there is something - a box or a vacuum, they at least have some boundaries and volume. Even mathematical "emptiness", i.e. zero, is already something. It is zero. It exists as a "mathematical reality", it has its own symbol "0", etc.

In short, the universe is infinite, space is infinite, time is infinite, and matter moving in space and existing in time is infinite. And therefore, the forms and varieties of matter are also infinite. The universe has no beginning and will have no end. All the concrete forms of matter that appear and disappear are finite. .

From this, for example, follows the conclusion that there are no gods or higher powers, that somewhere in the universe there is necessarily life, including intelligent life. But the main thing: everything that will be, has already happened . But at the same time, everything that was, and everything that will be, has always happened and will happen in a unique form . Just as in the universe there are no two absolutely identical things, no two absolutely identical atoms, but all things are similar to one degree or another, identical. So all events, on the one hand, are unique, on the other - they repeat each other.

So.

Matter is infinite.

It's moving.

Moves in infinite space and changes in infinitely flowing time.

It is a thing, i.e. it has mass, form, content, is a whole and a part of something larger.

Material forms interact as opposites and sometimes form stable unities.

These are the main characteristics of material forms and their movement in space and time.

If you learn these axioms of materialism, comprehend their deep content, then you will receive in your worldview a logical "coordinate axis" for a quick, almost intuitive primary scientific examination of any theoretical calculations. If some ideas contradict the above, then they are anti-scientific, if not, then they are possibly true.

The time will come when these foundations will be studied from the earliest years of life. In a thousand years, it will be difficult for people to imagine that in our era we somehow lived without a scientific-materialistic worldview, just as it is surprising today to realize how ignorant the medieval masses were, applauding the burning of yet another witch or yet another Giordano Bruno.

II. Development
Having clarified the basic conclusions about the fundamental foundations of being, in order to move on to society, it is necessary to understand what development is .

In nature, everything is constantly moving, one might say, chaotically. The magnitude of movement in the universe is equal to infinity. Somewhere something is destroyed, somewhere something new is formed. And something new is always the addition of something simpler. And destruction is always the disintegration of something complex into something simple.

Therefore, development is also a movement, but not just a movement, but a movement from the simple to the complex, from the primitive to the more perfect .

The key to understanding the essence of development is the formula of IDENTITY and UNITY OF OPPOSITES described above . Everything complex is composed of the simple precisely as a unity of opposites that possess identity.

In general, all "units" of matter are identical at least as material objects. However, in a specific case, for their cohesion, i.e. stable unity, a higher level of identity is required. Roughly speaking, they need to fit each other. If you throw a brick at the Sun, it will simply burn and their "unity" will end almost instantly. The Sun will not even notice this, since the difference in their "potentials" is too great. But if another star approaches the Sun, they can form a pair, make up a unity of opposites, given their identity. The same is true for molecules and atoms, they connect with each other, but with certain qualitative characteristics. So it is with everything in the world.

When comprehending a specific phenomenon as a unity and identity of opposites, one should not fall into schematism. We are not talking about the direct connection of two things or processes, two "units" of matter. Unity is a kind of internal struggle, and opposites are a kind of two vectors, two forces within a phenomenon. These opposites themselves constitute a multitude of different elements within themselves. For example, a specific person can be imagined as the identity and unity of the biological and social, the physical and spiritual. Their identity is manifested in the fact that both the biological-physical and the social-spiritual are the human organism, the same apparatuses are responsible for hunger, thirst, instincts, and for thinking, love, empathy, talents and work. And their unity consists in the struggle of the so-called bodily vector and the spiritual, in the volitional overcoming of primitive semi-animal reflexes, instincts by consciousness, morality, some social functions, public duty, etc. In the unity and identity of opposites there is always a leading side, a leading opposite, which seems to win the struggle. In man, this is the spiritual side. If there is a man in whom biology, reflexes and instincts have taken over, then he writes himself out of the composition of people, returning to the world of animals.

When we take deeper definitions of a person, already within the framework of studying society, then in them the same identical opposites in unity will still be visible, but at a more complex level. Because they reflect the essential characteristics of a person.

Let me note in due course that in science, truths of a higher order always clarify previous truths. On the one hand, they make the previous understanding less significant, already too superficial, on the other hand, they repeat previous truths at a higher level, in more detail and concretely. In this sense, knowledge is spiral-shaped . Why? Because the development of material forms itself is spiral-shaped.

Everything complex and new is a repetition of the simple and old at a higher level . This truth is partially reflected in the proverb: "Everything new is well forgotten old." But the source of this proverb is even more philosophically accurate, a line from a poem by the now little-known poet Fofanov: "Ah, the wisdom of being is economical: everything new in it is sewn from old stuff."

Again, for the sake of simplicity of logical illustration, the spiral-shaped nature of development (and, consequently, knowledge) is described by the formula that development is the NEGATION OF NEGATIONS . One opposite negates another opposite, and their unity represents something new, i.e., the negation of this negation. This sounds rather complicated, but if you think about it carefully, it is perhaps impossible to formulate it more concisely.

The concept of development also relates to the main conclusions about the fundamental bases of existence, which in the system represent the laws of the universe . In other words, these are objective, internal, essential, stable and therefore recurring connections of the phenomena of the objective world. They cannot be changed, destroyed or bypassed, they can only be ignored or cognized and taken into account .

So, the development of matter gave birth to life on Earth.

The difference between non-living and living matter is not so insurmountable. There are many intermediate forms, for example viruses. They are seemingly non-living organisms, but their existence is very similar to the behavior of living organisms.

The development of life on Earth led to the emergence of human society - a social form of matter. There are also many examples of transitional forms, higher animals, which also live collectively, communicate, etc. In short, they vaguely resemble societies. Domesticated animals, especially those living directly with people, are significantly more developed than their natural counterparts. Some domestic dogs quite well display human emotions, communicate with their owners in a primitive way, experience simple experiences, etc. But all animals lack something to become conscious. Some lack arms, others - legs, others - the complexity of nervous tissue, etc. Only man was able to leave, to rise from the animal kingdom. This path was also not easy, and the concept of "homo sapiens" is generalized. There were different "branches" of anthropoid apes, and now there are people of different races, etc. But we all make up human society, we all became people.

So WHAT distinguishes man from animal? What made a humanoid ape into Man?

The most obvious: speech, culture, morality, ethics, etc. This is how religion and bad philosophy explained it: a person has a soul. But animals and plants do not have a soul. In the past, "civilized" Europeans believed that slaves and aborigines did not have a soul. But this is all an unscientific understanding, it only takes some individual elements of society and puts them in the center of the explanation in order to introduce the idea that God endowed man with his essence, humanity.

In reality, all living organisms exist through the struggle with external living conditions . Life arises in certain circumstances (atmosphere, water, mineral soil), appears from the development of inanimate nature and is distinguished by its specific form of movement - the exchange of substances with the natural environment. At first, the simplest, mainly single-celled, organisms, bacteria, appeared. Then they gradually developed, forming two main directions - plants and animals. Plants are more primitive because they do not move, while animals, including insects, have learned to move, navigate in space and get food for themselves at this expense.

The animal world evolved, more and more complex organisms appeared with more and more sophisticated life support systems, which allowed them to expand their habitat, food supply, and better adapt to changing environmental conditions. There were and are a great many different species, varieties, groups, and types of animals. Life is seething and goes on on all fronts. Some swim, others crawl, others fly, and others do a little bit of everything. Some feed on this, others on that, but they are all united by their metabolism with the external environment. This metabolism is the struggle for life. Or rather: life is the struggle .

Remember this expression, it makes sense in all possible aspects. Life is a struggle . They say: "Movement is life." This is true, but it is more accurate to say that life is a specific form of movement, namely, struggle. Now society is at such a low level of development that people do nothing but fight with each other. From competition, careerism and the "battle of the sexes" in relationships to terrorism, genocide and war. But this will pass, the time will come when the struggle of humanity will become joint, collective and will focus on the transformation of nature, including the conquest of outer space.

It is written above that matter, one might say, moves chaotically. But it only seems so to us, in fact, all movement of matter is lawful . The lawfulness of the movement of matter lies in the fact that movement is absolute . Matter exists through movement, and all material forms and formations move, collide, cling and fall apart. The vector and character of movement of each "particle" of matter is determined by its past state and interaction with other "particles". The movement of matter has no cause, no initial impulse, it has never begun and will never stop. Such a physical concept as inertia reflects the indestructibility of movement and the absence of absolute rest (only space itself can be called absolute rest).

From this movement it follows that in the world of inanimate matter everything collides with everything everywhere and this continuously causes the creation of new forms of matter. In the depths of the Earth, complex minerals are formed from simple substances, in outer space, stars and planets are formed from particle flows, etc. That is, the irresistibility of movement and the collision of material objects leads to the appearance of something new, albeit quantitatively, in terms of mass, this new is a mere trifle, it looks like an exception to the general flow of simple motion (ether, protons and light atoms).

This same law, but at a much more complex level, governs the evolution of living organisms, i.e. the appearance and disappearance of organisms and their methods of adaptation (adaptation, speciation, extinction).

A living organism is many times more complex than non-living substances. It has much more dynamic movement, it continuously renews itself, grows, changes many times faster than simple and complex substances. A living cell is a rather fragile system due to its complexity. The life cycle of a cell lasts from twenty minutes to, in rare cases, several years. An organism exists through renewal, division of cells (or one cell, if it is a single-celled organism), but its life cycle is not long compared to non-living matter. Renewal of cells always only approximately recreates their previous forms and content, just as children only approximately repeat the personalities of their parents and, in general, the “average personality” of the previous generation. Under the influence of various external factors, cells and cell structures that form the apparatus of the organism accumulate various changes. This process is called mutation.

Thus, a living organism in this sense is, as it were, an interaction of two principles: heredity , i.e., the repetition of cells and their structures during division (reproduction), and mutations , i.e., changes, differences of cells and their structures from the parental ones. Constant mutations lead to continuous changes in living organisms. Based on external conditions, organisms with the most successful mutations survive, which gradually become part of the heredity base. This is how the mechanism of natural selection works. And in it, naturally, the identity and unity of opposites is also manifested.

In other words, in this case, development is a movement from simple to complex as a way of survival, as a type of improvement of metabolism.

It should be understood that mutations do not always represent a complication. They can also be a simplification, the death of some apparatuses and systems of the organism. It is important to record the continuous movement in the biological form of matter, due to which adaptation to living conditions occurs.

In no case should evolution be presented as a process of optimal organization of beings. Nature does not know such categories as rationality, optimality, expediency. These are concepts of human thinking. The main thing in nature is movement, and not WHAT is destroyed or continues to exist in the course of this movement, helps or hinders survival, is rejected by adaptation. Moreover, as a result of "rejection" what remains is not the best, but sufficient for adaptation.

In fact, if you observe the leaps in the development of anything complex, you will find that the leap does not occur where the conditions are most ripe-overripe, but where they are ripe enough. The anthropoid ape from which humans evolved was not the most developed primate, but it was quite developed. Gifted children usually grow up to be mediocre individuals, and true geniuses were only talented enough in childhood. The first truly communist revolution took place not in the most industrially and socially developed country, but in a sufficiently developed one. Scientific discoveries are almost always made by people who were not considered the main stars and experts in the scientific and professional community.

Logically, this is explained by the fact that the moment of transition from an old quality to a new quality, the moment of a leap in development, represents, as it were, the MEASURE of what is necessary. They say: "In everything, one must know the measure." Although here we are not talking about a sense of measure, nevertheless, measure objectively exists in any movement from simple to complex, which is reflected in folk wisdom.

Therefore, you will often notice that perfectionists, i.e. people who strive for boundless improvement of something, if they do not find the strength to stop, then they are unable to either complete what they started or create something new. It is necessary to strive for perfection and improvement, but without becoming a hostage to this desire. This is one of the laws of any development - after reaching a certain level of quantitative growth, a leap in quality occurs.

III. Origin of society
The most important factor in the complication, higher level of development of animals, was collectivism . Just as some insects form superorganisms, some animals have adapted over time to survive in communities. It is in the presocial connection of relatively independent animals that the key to understanding the process of forming communication, high interaction, and the unification of efforts lies. The ancestors of people were such animals that survived collectively.

Here we see the influence not of mutation as such, although its role is also present, but of the development of forms of interaction within a species, a community. But the essence is the same: animals adapt, just in this case mainly by reproducing behavior (i.e. through the evolution of mental processes), and not by reproducing the body.

That is, we see development already as a complication for the improvement of metabolism (to a lesser extent), and as a complication of mental processes that control behavior. And this is logical, the body has become more complex, has reached sufficient perfection (the skeleton, internal organs, nervous system, limbs, etc. have appeared), the process of deeper complication of behavior has begun , including interaction.

The successful configuration of the organism and animal collectivism made anthropoid apes capable of collective work. It was work that made a man out of an ape .

What is labor? It is, one might say, the highest form of metabolism with the external environment, which allows not only to obtain food and adapt individual external, superficial elements of the environment to one's needs, but to transform nature in the broadest and deepest sense. Man creates complex tools, learns about the surrounding reality, sets goals, plans, and changes and transforms it through joint efforts with his fellows. As a result, through collective labor, man creates a powerful material and spiritual culture, thus satisfying the need for his own existence and development.

In other words, labor is also a form of struggle for life with external, natural conditions, but mainly not through self-adaptation, but through the transformation of these conditions themselves. The content of the labor process is the transformation of nature, the essence of labor is the reproduction of society through the transformation of nature . That is, humanity, having moved from simple adaptation to external conditions to the transformation of nature, itself changes, develops, improving methods, ways of labor, obtaining ever better results. At the same time, the main characteristic of labor, one of the conditions for its possibility is the unification of people's efforts, collectivity.

Labor emerges as a social phenomenon and is carried out by society, not by an individual or a local collective. It is important to understand this because an individual may feel as if he or she is working as an isolated, self-sufficient subject. However, even if you are Robinson Crusoe, you can only survive due to the “social forces” of your personality (will, knowledge, skills, experience).

So, we move on to society, and now in it we will find the manifestation of all the same fundamental laws of existence. But it is time to say something about the individual, because man looks at society first and foremost through the eyes of the individual.

Contemporary liberal ideological attitudes about the relationship between the individual and society, the individual and the collective teach that the individual is valuable in himself, he is an independent figure, entering into a relationship with society (in the form of other individuals, their private and group interests). This directly contradicts the essence of society as it is understood by science, which has studied the process of the formation of society.

In general, one of the most important methods of scientific research is to consider the subject of research from the point of view of its genesis, i.e. origin . If you have something incomprehensible in front of you, then the first thing you need to do after the initial observation is to study how it came into being, the process of its formation. This provides the key to understanding. The presentation of the material can be analytical (i.e. move from the structure and constituent elements to the whole), but scientific research always begins with genesis, with an examination of how this “whole” was formed (therefore, analysis is not a scientific method, but a truly scientific method includes it as a moment). That is why, by the way, the scientific discovery of the role of labor in the transformation of anthropoid apes into people played a key role. That is why all idealists and preachers cling so tightly to the absurd ideas of the divine or other mystical origin of man, and fiercely fight precisely against scientific truth. After all, if man was not created by God, then most likely... man created God. For God, as a figure who has no influence on anything, is of no interest to the church.

IV. Man
Man is a manifestation of society , and nothing else. An individual is a product of society. What kind of society is, such are the people who make it up. An individual cannot exist outside of society. If a person is forcibly removed from society, he will perish as a miserable, good-for-nothing animal.

In short, society is primary in relation to the individual, dominates him, and he is its particular manifestation . Therefore, society is a social form of matter, and the individual is its moment . But not just some “cog” or component element: the individual is a reflection of society as a whole.

This truth is quite easy to think through. Take an individual. He seems to be absolutely free in his actions or inactions, guided by views, ideas, needs, interests, emotions, passions, free to act spontaneously, without thinking at all about what he is doing. He seems to be limited only by people like him, with similar input conditions. Therefore, the only limitation for him can be the will of other people and his own views, mental makeup.

But where do his views, ideas, passions, emotions come from? What are the grounds and conditions for their emergence? Why are they like this and not different? Why do they coincide in many people and large groups of people with identical dispositions are formed, but these identical dispositions of different groups are opposed to each other? Wouldn't it be more logical for all people to want the same thing and act rationally?

And man appears even more limited if we take into account THAT which he is incapable of changing. He is born into certain conditions of social life that do not depend on him, into the circumstances that were formed by previous generations. This concerns both material culture - cities, industry, technologies, etc. - and spiritual culture - language, science, art, ideologies, etc. He can only live in these circumstances, participate in their further development. Or... kill himself, thus taking away his talents from the total potential of society and orphaning his loved ones.

Take yourself personally. Look closely at the structure of your life and your consciousness and you will understand the following. You as a person are a product and manifestation of the society of the era in which we live. Everything that is meaningful in you: all your thoughts, experiences, ideas, talents, shortcomings, volitional impulses, needs, whims and caprices - all this is a private, individual refraction of the essence and specificity of social existence, which gave birth to you. Not only and not so much your parents, but the entire set of social relations.

There is no individual person, there is only society, which manifests itself in individuals. The idea of ​​the existence of an individual, which is the basis of liberalism, is the most harmful vulgarity and distortion of reality.

Theoretically, by studying an individual mentally healthy person, one can get to the bottom of everything social that gave birth to them. This is what psychology speculates on - one of the most unscientific, commercialized "sciences" of our time. Psychologists at best do people a disservice, inventing tricks on how to come to terms with certain circumstances, to adapt to them, and usually simply cripple people spiritually for the sake of making money. There is only one normal path to a healthy psyche: 1) awareness of what society is, what it is like, how to fight for its improvement, 2) goal-oriented, productive, socially useful practice. If we proceed from the principle of self-isolation of the individual from society, then nothing but a spiritual and moral invalid will result. Moreover, those who train and support a host of psychologists, mentors, coaches and other evil spirits benefit from fragmenting society, separating people and instilling capricious, painful egoism in their psyche. The powers that be need the average, ordinary person to be 1) a weak-willed executive worker, 2) a greedy, envious, insatiable consumer and 3) a self-sacrificing whiner.

(Much, much, much more...)

https://prorivists.org/serious/#3

Google Translator